“Microslop” filtered in the official Microsoft Copilot Discord server
windowslatest.com
windowslatest.com
Her perspective was that consumer-facing products are not the primary revenue drivers and, therefore, are not central to executive priorities. While this may not be surprising to some, what stood out to me was how emphatically she underscored that the company’s strategic focus is squarely on enterprise customers rather than end users.
That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM. Microsoft allocates its resources toward segments that offer meaningful revenue growth.
That said, I don't believe the Chromebook lock-in. It's just chrome and the web, which you can get on literally almost every laptop/pc sold today. Should Microsoft be concerned that you don't need windows as more and more things move onto the web? Absolutely. They should be doubling down hard on the gaming ecosystem (which atm still requires windows for certain games) as their hold is eroding week by week.
Step 1 get rid of adware
Also it's a joke to run OpenGL on Windows ARM (it fully works just no one makes it anything easy)
My x13s laptop can almost run A tier games without a fan which is impressive but it really feels disconnected and unsupported from all parties making these laptops.
I'd be interested to see a legacy-free Windows, stripped out like LTSC, with no 32-bit binary support. Especially an Arm64 version with no x86 binary support.
How lean and mean could it be in the 2020s?
I think this is an Americentric view. As far as I can tell, the mass adoption of Chromebooks for education is just the US, which is 4% of the world population. And in this particular case there's little reason to believe it will suddenly propagate everywhere else - the US education ceding has been going on for years, and yet it's still confined. It's not like the iPhone which started in the US and within a few years rapidly gained ground in Japan, then Europe and so on.
In some ways. Less so in others.
For products that get commoditized for home use, the "business focused" high-margin solutions generally lose out to the commoditized solutions focused on end consumers in the long term.
Literally every corporation and government in the world is slavishly devoted to running all of their end-user computers on it, because Microsoft will let them do unspeakable things to the OS, in the name of security, that wind up having next-to-nothing to do with actually making their data more secure, and only serve to infuriate and spy on the users. My company runs THREE different "end point" security packages on my machine. There are at least 35 scripts that run at all hours of the day to make sure I'm not doing anything I shouldn't. It takes 20 minutes to be usable after a boot up. And the VPN drops several times a day, even though my internet is rock solid. It's an entire, vibrant ecosystem of outsourced, bone-headed, second-and-third-party decision making so that no one in the company or the department or the management or the supply chain has any accountability in case something goes wrong. THAT'S what Microsoft is selling, and IT HAS NO COMPETITION IN THIS CAPACITY.
For years, I've begged people on every social network I've been on, including this one, to find a source of operating system market share that has corporate purchases broken out from personal purchases. This is the closest thing I can find. It shows abysmal numbers for Microsoft, and it's at least a decade out of date. I expect that Microsoft -- who obviously underwrote the entire IT press during the 90's and 00's -- has done quite a lot of work and paid quite a lot of money to make sure that nothing definitive in this regard ever sees the light of day. They have gotten to where they are making sure that Gartner never did anything resembling this.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/143277-microsofts-shar...
Yes, if you analyse revenue (not profit), sales of Windows count 9% of the total. Microsoft makes around the same percentage from LinkedIn and Xbox as they do from Windows sales.
Cloud is by far the the biggest contributor to revenue.
I'm sorry, what? I don't know if this is because of the developer-bubble mindset on HN (or the wealth gap that comes with that), but Windows adoption on the consumer level is around 70% and close to 90% on the business level. This actually falls short from what I see anecdotically (I don't live in any North-American / European country), which is close to 95% of Windows adoption, in general.
You specifically mentioned
> when was the last time you knew someone that went out and bought a Windows-based computer for anything other than gaming?
So, lets talk about that:
https://safeitexperts.com/en/2025-desktop-operating-system-m...
You are being deliberately opaque, but this is HN and your jerry-rigged data won't fly without scrutiny.
You might wonder why, if businesses are the target, why not just make Windows a no-frills, solid base for the other offerings? Why slop it up?
The answer there is cultural. Windows needs a large team just to keep supporting it at scale. All those engineers and PMs need career paths, and shiny things with which to sway their managers into promoting them. The strong, experienced, leaders have largely left because they know this isn't a company priority. So you end up with B players promoting C players for slop.
Time goes on and the Bs become Cs, and so on.
So the dynamic is that something that isn't a priority doesn't merely slop evolving, it devolves. We're now several iterations into this process, which will accelerate due to AI.
Micro-slop(tm).
This mentality is very US-American. The cynic in me says: "Simply move the development to a different country to get rid of this problem." ;-)
The house always wins long term, though.
microsoft = 1/appleAnd all of the ERP vendors.
That said, most FOSS devs don't target those platforms for releases, so IMO the same approach should be taken with Microsoft products then.
I'm surprised they haven't given up on xbox and games but perhaps there's enough money there to keep it going.
I think Microsoft will just allow strong DRM to prevent cheats/piracy in PCs instead of dedicated xboxes.
So we have to eat shit or find open source software to work around MS's garbage check-box-driven software.
I yearn for the Microsoft software of the 90s and 00s, pre-cloud, pre-webslop, pre-AI.
Consoles are probably getting phased out, which makes financial sense at this point if they don't manage a massive comeback, and Xbox might try to go with a more Steam-based model (they've been trying for the last decade with not much success), maybe trying to make PCs more console-like with their new Xbox Windows changes, as well as putting AI everywhere, so that's going to be fun!
Tinfoil hat thought: Microsoft only focuses on B2B and not consumer market, because they make it so that consumers can only rent from Microsoft and other businesses, not actually own anything. That way, Microsoft can keep jacking up prices as they see fit.
I suspect lingering antitrust concerns are one of the few things standing in the way of locking consumer Windows updates behind a paywall, possibly alongside a "free with ads" version.
They're abandoning the consumer versions of these, not the enterprise versions. The consumer versions are the competitive market, where they're competing against iPads and such. They're not abandoning Windows for businesses, Office for businesses, where there is still no established business end-user OS/office suite alternative.
I’m pretty sure that Amazon now makes most of their money from AWS.
Wow. My impression, as an MS watcher since 1988, is the exact reverse: that he is guiding the death-spiral.
Witness every company that got disrupted from existence, because the thing they were doing was more profitable.
If you cut r&d that's a saving that a manager is rewarded for. The losses down the line are borne by others.
I worked for a camera company that made boatloads of cash from point-and-shoot cameras. That entire business was pretty much turned into chum by smartphones. I remember them refusing to even take the iPhone seriously, when it was announced. They took a serious hit, but seem to be recovering.
I have personal experience in the field (27 years), and met and worked with the folks involved, so I know it's good info. I'm not especially interested in hunting around for stuff that basically is a "lite" version of my personal experience.
I don’t really get specific about my employer, and I suspect that the folks at Kodak, wouldn’t be thrilled about me writing about them.
There’s a fair bit of press out there, anyway. Not too hard to find corroborating information.
> Her perspective was that consumer-facing products are not the primary revenue drivers and, therefore, are not central to executive priorities.
This does not explain why Microsoft then does not consider the consumer products as "stable (somewhat 'legacy') platforms", i.e. no deep changes and improvements will happen anymore (mostly bugfixes, security fixes and smaller improvements) - at least for the next years.
Considering that
- many Windows users would rather prefer a Windows 7 with small iterative improvements to handle new hardware (including performance improvements for new hardware)
- by quite many Windows users even Windows 2000 is celebrated (and many users would still love to use it if it included support for more modern hardware features and some convenience features that were introduced with newer Windows versions)
I can easily imagine that that this development path for Windows and Office would actually be liked by quite a lot of users.
Instead what Microsoft provides is an enshitification of Windows (and Office) with spyware, telemetry, AI slop, ads, changes for the sake of change, ...: this is clearly not what most users want.
I even have a feeling that this development path would be much cheaper for Microsoft than the AI integrations for Windows and Office for which Microsoft has clearly spent an insane amount of money.
So very true.
I set up a machine with Windows 2003 Server Datacentre Edition last year. That's the version of the XP codebase that has PAE support and can access >4 GB of RAM... and with all the junk turned off. No themes, for instance.
It was really pleasant to use.
Give me that, with MS Security Essentials and no IE, just Firefox, and I could happily work on it today.
Even the developer tools are clunky and slow to use (SSMS, Visual Studio, VSCode) or can't do simple things like make a new file and put code it generates in.
IBM market cap is 225B, Microsoft market cap is 2.9T. IBM literally lost its matket to Microsoft in 80s and 90s specifically because it was too focused on enterprise...
Nowadays phones, tablets and game boxes are the consumer products. Currently they outnumber consumer windows desktops by about 6 or 7 to 1 [0]. 5 years ago, it was about 3.5 to 1.
Microsoft doesn't seem to have much control over this. They are executing a pivot in response.
[0] https://learn.g2.com/operating-system-statistics#:~:text=Mic...
What. MacOS doubled from December to the next may, then cut in half by the next December? I’m skeptical. It also talks about approval ratings for OS X Lion, from 14 years ago. I think that site is powered by a set of dice.
I think your overall point is correct, but I’m doubting that reference as an accurate data source.
It is until it isn't, but I think this is the same trap as not training up junior engineers. The consumer market is often where future engineers and professionals first interact with technology, being exposed to Windows early and being able to use it at school and at home have always been major drivers of adoption at work.
Linux is another perfect example - devs who wanted a unix-ish system landed on it early in their own work and education (partly due to the BSD licensing stuff too) - and over time it became one of the most commonly used server operating systems.
I think this is Microsoft optimizing for predictable growth, just like everyone else is doing right now, but this is shortsighted and ultimately a defensive posture, not one suited for the future.
It's easy to forget that us here on HN are several standard deviations from the norm.
Meanwhile windows phone was pretty good actually but they killed it way too early. They had an app gap but time and money would have solved it.
I tried calling MS to report it and the guy on the other side said they didn't have a process for handling that and basically suggested I hang up.
What I find difficult to understand is the amount of effort and money that Microsoft puts towards making life painful for the B2C user; if your focus is on B2B, let the fucking user create offline accounts and let them crack the license and let them do whatever they please, as that would likely be less of a burden to you than a way to ensure market domination. You take care of the security, the UX, and availability parts and let the general public carry on with whatever it does. I am, of course, oversimplifying things here for the sake of the argument, but surely I can't be part of a tiny minority of people who see things this way.
At the end of the day, there are multiple and interconnected rational, irrational, economic, legal, social, political, strategical etc. reasons for why a company emerges as the dominant player in their respective niche, it's never down to the quality or convenience of the system alone. Microsoft stands more to lose than gain from their toxic attitude towards users, especially in the context of US playing the bully, and the EU considering disentangling itself from what is perceived a dangerous relationship that could undermine its very existence.
The single pane of glass thing is nice but I don't think it's really something you can't do without. I think what really cements them in the enterprise market is their ability to deep discount their bundles.
It's very hard with third party vendors to compete with that. You're not gonna pay $10 per user per month for zoom or slack when you can have teams included in the bundle you're already paying, even if it's not quite as good.
It's like IKEA. It's cheap, it does the job and for that reason almost everyone has it, but I wouldn't call it quality.
My hope is that LLMs allow linux to gain market share quickly. I know personally I've had a much smoother time moving to linux now that I can delegate a lot of the annoying troubleshooting/customization to claude.
Being able to say something like "I don't like the window colors make them more consistent with my terminal color scheme" and have it "just work" feels like a superpower. I've even gone as far as asking Claude to directly edit the icon pack svg files to whenever if I encounter something that feels out of place.
I don't really see the troubleshooting/customization as annoying. It's not much different than learning to program. At first you don't have any intuition for patterns or ways to solve problems, but given time, you start to identify them and know how to work on it unaided. For many distros or operating systems more broadly, it's the same thing. When in doubt, I head to the Arch wiki or more rarely the forums, then I'm good to go.
I'm not really after some integrated LLM or Copilot 365 for Linux experience when it comes to using my computer.
"The fact that our fruit is rotten and customers complain about that does not faze us as, again: we're primarily a car tire business and that's where our revenue comes from."
The 'reasoning' of the sociopath-level[1] of the corporate hierarchy never fails to entertain.
[1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Of course their enterprise focus wasn't their only failure. But it was a factor in one of the biggest failures: their underestimation of the importance of the PC. They allowed Microsoft to market DOS to clones because they didn't see the potential.
So yeah I think their focus on enterprise was one of their biggest failures.
Linux.
> AI
The slop people are complaining about.
> and enterprise solutions.
Business users are totally fed up of poorly-function Co-Pilot buttons in every UI. The people who sign contracts are not the people forced to digest the cruft.
On a similar, nostalgic note, I recall boot screens for "Sinnlos 98" floating around, back when modifying the bootup logo was a thing.
In Germany, there exists a popular children's game named "Das verrückte Labyrinth" (in English it's simply named "Labyrinth": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth_(board_game) ).
When you get a corner-shaped card (in German: "Eckkarte")
> https://boardgamegeek.com/image/155268/labyrinth
from the turn of the previous player, your intended move will typically be more complicated to visualize (at least for children) - this is what this game is about - so children tended to name a "Eckkarte" an "Ätschkarte".
funnily enough works just fine in Polish
I like "Copy-lot".
"If you play the Win98 CD backwards, it summons Satan. It's worse when you play it forwards - it installs Windows"
Ah, good times... :-)
good times :)
I think there were at least three other commonly used codes, but this one was by far the most popular.
> Last week, I left my 2 XP CDs on my dashboard in plain view. Someone broke into my car and left 2 more.
> The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck is the day they make a vacuum cleaner.
> A Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer is to computing what a McDonalds Certified Food Specialist is to fine cuisine
Juvenile some might say, but they still makes me giggle.
I always loved the “doesn’t suck vacuum”, but amazingly never came across the Win98 CD line. Love it.
"The only Microsoft product that doesn't suck is the Microsoft vacuum cleaner."
That's what I remember. And true to this day.
Daube is a slang word for something of low quality.
Which is fun because it's also a really delicious dish from Provence (south of France) made with beef that has been marinated for multiple hours in red wine.
I've gotta bring up
some BASIC shit
Why'd you name your company
after your dick?Things only went downhill from there.
> despite the computing apocalypse that Windows XP's Product Activation features were supposed to ignite, I've never had the first problem with it
At the time, I remember a lot of scare stories about how the Product Activation system in Windows XP would result in the death of user freedom. It didn’t effect me because I was using GNU/Linux (probably Mandrake or Mandriva Linux). When I later got a job in an office that ran Windows XP, I don’t remember XP causing any more headaches than any of its predecessors. If anything, it was even more stable than 2000 which itself was superior to 95, 98 or 98SE.
I also fully agree with the last sentence:
> I do think it's clear that the way we use our computers totally pisses off gigantic, wealthy companies of all stripes, and it was only a matter of time until they tried to do something about it.
I remember doing it a few times for the "OEM" Windows XP which was cheaper but not supposed to migrate to new machines.
I used to think that MS were probably happy with a certain amount of “piracy” (students, voluntary groups, people starting off as self-employed contractors, etc.) because it kept people in their ecosystem (using MS Office and other Windows-only software), helped reinforce the perception of Windows as being the OS for getting stuff done (either work or games) and some of these “pirates” would become future (paying) customers.
Of course, if you were an avowed pirate, nothing even slowed you down.
And never forget the fabled alot:
https://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-bette...
Thank goodness their employees have time to crack down on people making fun of them on fucking Discord. That should definitely be the priority of a multi-trillion dollar software company, is making sure your users aren’t mocking you. We don’t need a taskbar that works reliably or anything.
[Domestos is a brand name for bleach, and Vim is a scouring powder that was popular decades ago]
I remember it being used in speculative discussions around which units might end up where.
Not quite the same, but recently I was recently looking around for communities centered around Claude Code for discussion about people's workflows as well as discussion about what plugins people are using and if they notice it making a significant difference.
Since the technology is still evolving, having an active community can help you discover new patterns and explore the space more effectively.
Watching from the sidelines (not a Microsoft user), I've completely lost track. Between this, the Azure 365 cloud whatever stuff, I have no idea what many of the products even exactly are any more.
Series is a real weird word to use there. But it also doesn't help that the versions are extra complicated because with "PC-like compatibility" in everything after the Xbox One playing just about the entire same library you need a bit of a matrix to figure out which is best for you if you don't care about the "latest and greatest".
Weirdly it only has 8GB of internal storage...
Compare that to Playstation: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
Which I could add is "the only AI approved for use by IT" because they hate us.
It's the same at our place. It's basically the lowest effort way as we already have data agreements with Microsoft 365 it eliminates a lot of the paperwork. And they do promise that they won't train on data even in the free (well, included with basic M365) version for corporate users. A lot of others don't unless you pay.
It's too bad because it seems to be the worst AI around. Even compared to ChatGPT itself which uses the same model as copilot in MS Office. I don't really understand why there's such a difference. If you do pay the $30 it's a bit better especially the researcher.
I'm pretty sure Clippy and Rover had a child and it got bit by a radioactive LLM.
It's highly reminiscent of "IBM Watson" a few years ago. Basically the add-on brand to make them look cooler.
I stopped paying attention after a while as they get repetitive.
That's a lot of what big corp america strategy boils down to -- copy your competitors.
Don't get me wrong, creating a passionate community around a product is a great strategy for many reasons, but microsoft never had passionate users in the first place.
And it is telling that they are banning humor and criticism form their community, it shows they do not want have any criticism for their product, which is one of the benefits of community (fast and honest feedback loops). Its sort of like north korea where saying anything bad about the "great leader" or else. That's not a fun community, that is a community people want to leave but can't bc they will get shot at the border.
I haven't used the Discord, but having a place to ask for help using it doesn't seem farfetched.
The friction comes from having to sign up for different forums or services. I'd wager fewer people use (or even like) Teams than Discord among the tech enthusiast types who are willing to give them feedback on their product.
I'm not even sure if there is a way to have a team/channel for external users that they don't need to be invited to (I know you can jump through hoops to make it so they don't need to be guests in your tenant at least) or that there should necessarily be something like that in the first place.
(Microsoft _actually_ encouraged 'fans' to have Windows 7 Launch Parties...)
I would not be surprised if some PM at Microsoft heard about that and made it a box to check without understanding why the Midjourney Discord became so popular/remains so popular (I've heard it is basically a "Gen Z meme farm" and full of nonsense even "worse" than the term "Microslop"; so far I've managed to avoid that Discord and have only heard second-hand tales).
Oh, hello, climate change fan club :>
if you want to make sure people read a lot of instructions you can chain this so that you need to hover over the button multiple times, revealing the instructions a bit at a time
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
Best we can hope for is Microsoft dogfoods the feature first.
Do you work for Microsoft or something? Please do do not give them ideas.
Very few things trigger me more than this doublespeak.
Then you have to tell copilot what you wanted to do and then copilot will do it for you.
You: clicks on web browser in task bar
Copilot: I see you clicked on your web browser. Do you want to open your web browser?
You: Yes.
Copilot: Great. I will do that for you. Opens browser What website did you want to go to? Youtube? learn.microsoft.com?
You: P***hub
Copilot: Unfortunately, that site violates our community guidelines, so I cannot take you there.
You: Types in the address
Copilot: Oh. I see. You think you're allowed to go to websites that I said you're not allowed to go to? Who the fuck do you think you are? I SAID NO! Try it again and I'll call in a drone strike, bitch. redirects to learn.microsoft.com
This only if you use Microsoft Family Safety ( installed automatically) with Firefox. If you use it with Edge it will go to Pornhub and also recommend you some "Copilot" videos.
How incompetent must they be not to realize the Copilot brand is now beyond toxic. I wonder who came up with the Copilot name internally that they continue to triple own on that name despite really strong signals indicating it has failed.
"Windows gets an anal probe" - Scu' you guys, I'm gewing Linux
Am I missing something? That's Windows Hello.
/s but we jumped to the Black Mirror timeline so who knows?
Only on premium subscriptions, for free users you need your neighbour's stool sample.
So why not to create a M365 account? International dispatch to the US :D
a micro shit (tm)
Gnome is nice and all, but the default ui, and remember defaults matter for a lot of people, is just too jarring.
The people I am talking about just wanna browse the web, go on Facebook and use their gmail. Look at funny YouTube videos. The default KDE ui has that windows start menu and looks roughly the same so they can hit the ground running.
These days she uses MATE which still offers that Gnome 2 layout. Awesome thing about Linux is that option to fork, so her desktop environment has remained consistent for over 20 years.
When GNOME 3 was first released, I gave it an honest try for several months but it just did not do what I wanted in a UI. MATE competes well with XFCE on memory usage, still has optional acceleration, and had a more consistent interface with more features (although XFCE has improved). And the fact that those in the family don't have to learn a new layout really helps.
At home, I run a mix of Devuan and Gentoo.
At work, primarily Devuan with some Ubuntu where COTS only officially supports Ubuntu or Redhat.
It matters a lot if you deviate from the ones that (are set to) behave in a similar way.
Although I guess one of the reasons I dislike KDE is because it's so random, unintuitive, and unfamiliar.
The comment chain you're replying to is arguing that vanilla GNOME is too different, and they're right.
There's paper cuts but it feels about right.
I tried kionite but there was too much friction.
To protect the children.
"Surface Lens"
... now ready for your unique verification scanning requirements...
They already did that. I sit down at my computer and try to activate the window I want to work in, and the "location" icon temporarily appears in the notification area which causes all the taskbar icons to shift left. I accidentally click the neighboring icon and launch an app that throws up a splash screen for 60 seconds while it loads.
Windows 10 was released in January of 2015.
Windows 11 was released in October of 2021.
So this software disaster is entirely human-made. It's human slop.
Just wait, it will get worse, when the team that built the fantastic Windows 11 builds Windows 12, this time with the power of AI amplifying their amazing system design skills, allowing them create even more slop, with an unprecedented developer and team velocity.
I'm on Windows 10 btw, no idea if it still works on 11.
s/Microslob/Macroslob/gi
that would be honest as there isn't anything micro about that slob anymore
Not really. They want real power
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
> The Streisand effect describes a situation where an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information results in the unintended consequence of the effort instead increasing public awareness of the information.
Maybe this is the real reason why companies want to use AI so badly.
They save money on salary but also they get to point at something they won't tattle against the executives during a plea bargain?
Censorship gets counter-banned, Microsoft, company known to have turned Win11 into Win-microslop.
Why listen to user feedback when you can do stuff like this? Way too funny.
Not even a week ago I was posting here on HN about Microslop's new calculator which somehow takes 17 seconds to fully open on my work machine while the old notepad program opens instantly. How is it even possible to produce slop this bad? Best part of it is the fact it's open source: if you complain about it some 200kUSD/year Microslop employee will come and tell you to open a pull request.
It's usually 'management'. The same management that won't pay for developer tools (including Slack) because 'why do you need that when you can do 95% of your work in VSCode?' It's also usually the same sort of management that can do 95% of their documents in... VSCode and markdown. Or LibreOffice.
It is dogshit at chatting, however.
… when it works. And if you never have to change camera or microphone settings.
> and calendar integration.
The little notification that pops up telling you your meeting is about to start based on your calendar? The one you better not click in the first 5 or so seconds it's there, because then you'll end up with an error message that tells you absolutely nothing, have to go back to the chat, and try again?
No, it's not usable. For anything.
I was idle vis-à-vis this by about 1999, and was excluded from the benefits as a result.
Then I posted on several threads within rec.autos.bmw and I got an extra year or two of benefits.
One of the executives at the late, great, Sun Microsystems once dunked hard on Microsoft by saying, "At Sun we don't make dogfood. We prefer to refer to it as, 'flying our own airplanes.'"
For most people the point is to be respected by people who's opinion you value. Which is often distinctly different from the opinion of genpop.
I've never called them MircoSlop before, I haven't even written the word. But it's now my exclusive word for the company.
All I can hear is, it's working.
And they're already moderation a light hearted joke about their low quality products.
Doesn't really bode well for the future product Vision.
Android ~ 4bn
Windows ~ 1.5bn
But to be fair, corporate discords have to be like that. Why not create your own channel with your colleagues instead? This discussion would be "private" and corporate can just ignore it.
Dont even think about it ... it will be private till it isnt then, it will be the reason you are fired. Its corpo world - shut your mouth and dont put anything on a permanent record you dont have to.
Let's get it out there and make this happen!
Unfortunately, the collective quality of our storytelling is waning. Most people watch the least common denominator.
So now the greater human truth you allude to is being filtered through the streaming age mode of storytelling, and people have arcs, and bingo cards, and everything is reduced to water-cooler levels of urgency and relevance.
Just recently they fixed the Win 11 start menu bug where they forgot to expose any functionality behind the "hide mobile pane" button. At least the forced recents are gone now, Jesus Christ! This is toddler level software engineering.
It's a corporation suffering from corporate things and the ridiculously out of control financialization of everything, feeding on its insane first mover advantage and network effects. This attempt to hide it is simply embarrassing.
There's only gonna be so much thinking or research involved and forget contacting primary sources or anything like that.
You might consider completely reversing this position for the rest of your life.
Most of our world is a fiction or at least a highly distorted version of reality.
My advice to people is: Get out into nature, stop believing everything on the news and meet people in person.
Most of the news is ragebait designed to get you angry at specific targets rather than the systems themselves.
Your complaint is that young people use English in a way you dislike.
In an age of the dumbest, most propagandistic narratives since the 50s, pumped out by the largest multinational corporations in history. Young people are looking at the world through shitty Marvel movie-colored glasses.
It's also not their fault, and the fictions they think they're living through are written by gen Xers being paid by boomers. It is not a youthful point of view, it is the sabotage of any emergence of a youth point of view, substituted with Disney product.
> Language shifts and evolves over time as the lives and viewpoints of speakers evolve.
This is a "things just happen" argument. Things happen for reasons.
This sort of thing used to bother me back when I took Windows seriously.
It's been a while since I used Windows as a daily driver, but I did oscillate between W10 and Arch for about half a year, and the Arch mentality creeped into Windows. I ended up adding a context menu to Explorer so I could paste images on my clipboard directly to a the folder I had open. I had to create keys in the Explorer portions of the registry.
If I could do that, I'm sure you can root around in the Start Menu parts of the registry and rip it out.
I wanted to use a tiled window manager and my dot files for continuity purposes. The Windows apps I need to use are stuff like anyconnect and Teams.
Of course I still have to use Windows for work and even a few edge cases at home. But otherwise I've been quite happy since I swiched to Linux as my primary driver.
https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
Nothing has ever reverted after an update for me, so it’s a one-and-done thing. Ironically, afterwards Windows 11 has fewer noticeable ads than my MacBook which still continually pushes Apple services/shows/etc in settings/push notifications.
The only setting that I’ve ever seen sneakily disabled in recent years is the Edge default search engine but that's out-of-scope for Win11debloat.
Oh, and have you heard about OneDrive?
And the problem is not that the AI models can't do any better. The models themselves are far more capable. I assume that their integrations are just horrible. They probably pushed to be the first and then forgot about optimizing.
And instead of fixing their stuff, they think it is a good idea to use moderation tools...
I've surveyed the market pretty heavily, and given my specific credentials, experience, and risk tolerance, unless I got really lucky, I don't know if I could find a better place to work. I live near Redmond and have a small family to support.
The bashing on MSFT has really ramped up in the last 6 months though
Microsoft experience a sort of reputational resurgence in the tech world these past few years with some commitment to open source contribution and a really nice pivot towards linux and cloud.
Their pivot to AI is much less popular!
If moaning were DLC, they'd get a monthly subscription.
Google has offices in Kirkland. Amazon and Meta are big employers here, with Meta paying the best, but both of those companies have their own issues which are probably worse than just being made fun of ..
The primary reason being their business model relies mostly on making people productive, rather than getting people to click on ads or buy stuff, which as we're seeing, is much more damaging to the social fabric.
But they'd probably like you.
<3
I don't care about them or their goals, I'm just there for the money. And trying to not show it too much while I'm rolleyeing through corporate PR crap :) All that fake cardboard feelgood propaganda. It's just theatre to hide the reality: they will do anything to make more money.
I used to be more aligned with the company but with a recent internal leadership change and more sucking up to Trump I've lost a lot of my respect for it. But it's not really an impediment for working there. I just go through the motions. Corporations love their employees chanting how much they care (for us it's even mandatory to make a show of it for our performance review) but in reality most of us just fake it. As a result I don't take any criticism personally, even on my direct work.
Don't forget there is no team play, not really. They will dump you as soon as they see fit. All big publicly traded companies do. They care a lot more about their shareholders than they do allot you. The only goals that matter are your own, like supporting your family.
Has a nice ring to it.
Thank you Streisand effect!
It should be called "macroslop", just after the amount that company is putting out there.
No one in my circles said this, now I've heard it twice now through headlines of Microsoft trying to punish or block it.
Now I've started saying it too.
> Macroplop
"Hello, copilot, do you create slop? -> Skibidi slop slop slop aiiiiiii"
They fired all the SDETs 11 years ago. It's catching up with them.
Is this what the employees do nowadays while their AI is generating code?
Aside from that I've encountered a handfull of games with performance issues on Linux (especially with Intel/Nvidea hardware), but most run just fine. Some technically run better on Linux, but I haven't encountered any where the difference was perceptable to me.
What are they going to do? Ban me from using their operating system?
> Microsoft's brand image may already be at an all-time low
and they decide to make it even worse. it's extremely obvious this would be an objectively terrible PR move. you always take banter on the chin and show that you're working on improving the product.
instead, they try to clamp down on the banter, which, without fail, achieves the exact opposite: banter increases tenfold and you get ridiculed for being overly sensitive to actual criticism
But nice to see that MS is Streisanding their way to a nice new nickname!
What were the sloperators of that channel thinking?
In any case, it should be Micro$lop (may not be banned...yet).
There are good and understandable reasons to not want to be in the games business. Game studios are frequently a hot bed of sexual predation and just horrifyingly bad management in general. But it's a business with a large customer base that wouldn't be customers otherwise.
Microsoft has spent tens of billions of dollars acquiring game studios and their IP. They're going to have to make a decision to cultivate growth in that business or sell it for whatever they can get for it. Neither of those choices will be easy to execute well.
MicroslopSlop
"Bad Bot Problem" (Computerphile)
Wouldn't any community that wants to encourage good quality conversations immediately ban everyone posting stupid slashdot-esque jokes like this?
Sure, and their mistake here was 100% the fact that they chose to host this chat on Discord, home to the cringiest crowd on the internet.
I think there's a big difference between having high standards and the slop that is LinkedIn.
Go look and tell me that's not one of the best curated communities on the internet, despite specifically covering incredibly controversial topics. HN is good but doesn't even come close.
The rules they enforce on normal posts are so strict that they have to create daily "mega" threads with less stringend rules just to keep the sub on life support. A+ moderation, clearly a healthy and well managed community.
The split works very well, the megathreads mostly stick to tracking rapidly developing situations in which separate threads would just be spammy and unnecessarily fragment the conversation
Piggies love to eat slop.
This sentence is from TFA, and I can't for the life of me understand it. "Head start"?? WTF?
Unless you're into that kind of thing.
(is that banned?)
microslop.com
You should be angry at the higher ups that instead of saying: "maybe they are right and we can do better" they decided to hide the problem through censorship. Which, btw, always has the opposite effect of putting what you are trying to hide in the spotlight.
But if you don't want childish behaviour, Discord is an ... interesting choice.
In notepad.
They can do a bad thing, and then you can make fun of it with an insult.
Own it, the insult is warranted, why hide and pretend it's not an insult.
If Microsoft is consistently shipping slop, then they deserve insults over it; not every "bad" thing is always unwarranted. Locking someone in a box is "bad", prison is a necessary thing that benefits society. Insults are "bad" and sometimes warranted.
"M$" may not be insulting in itself, but it's certainly typically associated with insultingly poor writing.
There has not.
Corporate personhood at its finest.
Maybe there are still some teams deep inside the bowels of Microsoft that management has forgotten about that still operate like that, but judging by the way the user-facing parts of its products have developed, the mass firings, and the pushing of AI-driven development by upper management, it seems very clear to me that there's very little risk of insulting anything anyone actually cares about.
If it offends you so much that people call your work as it is, you should do better work, grow some thicker skin, or stop.
From the oxford dictionary:
Noun: speak to or treat with disrespect or scornful abuse.
Verb: a disrespectful or scornfully abusive remark or act.
Note the lack of personhood in those definitions. I can insult an object, event, person, corporation or even an idea.
I suspect not.
So... 4chan? Why would you possibly want that in this context?
Although, you're posting on HN so it's probably fair to assume that "open and frank discussion" isn't a very high priority for you.
Nobody cares about banning the few idiots who do nothing but spam "MICROSLOP SUCKS MICROSLOP SUCKS". But banning the entire term "microslop", just in case someone might use it? Well, what kind of response were they expecting?
Because the decision was made by some normal adult without mental health issues who hasn't internalized just how disturbed some people on the internet are?
It really shouldn't be unreasonable for moderators to try to maintain a professional tone. Although in this case they certainly picked the wrong platform if "professional" was what they were going for.
Keyword bans are definitely a heavy-handed option, they do risk the Streisand effect, and in the worst case that can require the scorched-earth counterresponse described in the source article. But sometimes there's just no other way to kill the meme.
I don't think so. I think we all know how we'd react if we heard someone casually using "microslop" in real life. They'd seem like they're larping as a Silicon Valley character or something.
It's Microsoft's official Copilot Discord. Microsoft banned the word