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codeulikeon Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

Lets look at diversification of revenue:

meta $164b revenue in 2024: 98% advertising

google $350b revenue in 2024: 76% advertising, 12% google cloud, 12% other

apple $391b revenue in 2024: 66% hardware (iphone, ipad, mac), 25% services (app store etc), 9% other

amazon $638b revenue in 2024: 64% amazon store+associated services, 17% AWS, 9% ads, 11% other

microsoft $245b revenue in 2024: 40% azure/server products, 22% office, 10% windows, 9% gaming, 7% linkedin, 5% search+ads, 8% other

I'm not particularly a microsoft fan, just making this point because I think MS is poorly understood by the HN crowd

codeulikeon Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

They have failed to diversify, is what I meant, despite being around for approx 2 decades

codeulikeon Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

Google and Facebook have failed to do this, so why is that?

codeulikeon A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

Yes, if you work somewhere that is paying for the right add-ons, it can access all your stuff (messages, calendar, email, documents) and sythesise that all into helpful stuff like 'what am I supposed to be doing today?', 'what did I do last week (so I can fill in my timesheet)', what happened in that meeting I missed, etc. Under the hood its using whatever OpenAIs latest model is.

codeulikeon OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been

Its hard to come up with useful AI apps that aren't massive security or privacy risks. This is pretty obvious. For an agent to be really useful it needs to have access to [important stuff] but giving an AI access to [important stuff] is very risky. So you can get some janky thing like OpenClaw thats thrown together by one guy and has no boundaries and everyone on HN thinks is great, but its going to be very difficult for a big firm to make a product like that for mass consumption without it risking a massive disaster. You can see that Apple and Microsoft and Salesforce and everyone are all wrestling with this. Current LLMs are too easily hoodwinked.

codeulikeon Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

But still, Microsoft is the most diversified of the big players - they have Windows, Office, Enterprise, Xbox, Azure, Surface - they can survive a mess like their current copilot mess and still generally thrive

codeulikeon A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

I believe you need to pay for an add-on called "Microsoft 365 Copilot"

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365-copilot

codeulikeon A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

If you're on MS stack, this is all stuff that MS 365 Copilot will already do for you, but with much better defined barriers around what it can and cant access.

codeulikeon Jack Kerouac's 37 metre-long, first draft scroll of On the Road to be auctioned

... There are no paragraphs or chapters ...

Legendary

codeulikeon The history of C# and TypeScript with Anders Hejlsberg [video]

I was around in that era and yes when C# came out it was very obvious that Microsoft had been 'inspired' by the Java syntax ... Java had been the buzzword for the 5 years or so beforehand, like the only language that anyone talked about, so when Microsoft came up with C# it was glaringly obvious where they got the idea from.

On the other hand Java came with the VM ("write once run anywhere" as they used to say) but C# turned that inside out with the Common Langauge Runtime, so you had various languages like C# and VB.Net that compiled to the same bytecode.

The other innovation with Java back in the day was that it came with a huge library/framework of classes that did most of the stuff you would need to do. Similarly Microsoft's .NET library was a copy of that idea, although the frameworks themselves were pretty different.

codeulikeon TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe

Time Machine is held in high regard for some reason (maybe the fancy scrolling interface when you look for files to restore?) but it's not really useable. It pretends that backups-over-the-network are a possibility but its completely unstable over the network and invariably decides the backup is corrupt after a few months and then tells you you have to start from scratch.

codeulikeon OpenClaw – Moltbot Renamed Again

Not getting the lobster references, is that to do with lobste.rs ?

codeulikeon Winapp, the Windows App Development CLI

Great, thats not going to get confused with "Windows App" which is the new confusing and impossible to google name for Remote Desktop

codeulikeon Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes"

Some good examples there, also Doctor Who

codeulikeon Tell HN: 2 years building a kids audio app as a solo dev – lessons learned

How much work was it to comply with Spotify's design and branding guidelines when using their content? https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/design#introduct...

codeulikeon Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results

What cant i search for paid apps

codeulikeon Databases in 2025: A Year in Review

Barely any mention of Oracle or MS Sql Server, commonly reckoned to be #1 and #3 most used databases in the world

https://db-engines.com/en/ranking

codeulikeon Efficient method to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

Additional

codeulikeon I didn't realize my LG TV was spying on me until I turned off Live Plus

"I think my TV is spying on me."

1990s: "You should talk to a psychiatrist."

2013: "You should talk to my cousin Ernie, he's an IT whiz."

(via @kennwhite on twitter, 2013, now deleted)

codeulikeon Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning (2011)

(this is from 2017)

codeulikeon Bag of words, have mercy on us

Here’s my suggestion: instead of seeing AI as a sort of silicon homunculus, we should see it as a bag of words.

The best way to think about LLMs is to think of them as a Model of Language, but very Large

codeulikeon What, if anything, is universal to music cognition? (2024)

Integer frequency ratios in chords are probably favoured because of the way overtones line up and make the cilia of the inner ear vibrate

codeulikeon Show HN: Boing

The dream of agile exemplified

codeulikeon Show HN: Boing

It doesnt boing rotationally, only in a straight line. Like the spring isn't really there.

If I bend it right round to one side so the spring is curved I expect it to bounce round to the other side.

codeulikeon The 1957 “Spaghetti-Grows-on-Trees” Hoax

I recently showed this to one of my kids when they asked how spaghetti is made. The hoax continues

codeulikeon Blue Origin lands New Glenn rocket booster on second try

The weight of the landing legs is what made spacex go for the grab-tower

codeulikeon .NET 10

I think thats F# not C#

codeulikeon A brief history of Time Machine (2024)

Whenever I've tried to use Time Machine over the network, to a NAS or even to another Mac, it craps out after a few months and says the backups are invalid and asks to start again from scratch.

Advice seems to be 'only use it with external drives' and then every time you plug the drive in it wants the password.

codeulikeon XSLT RIP

Add XSLT to your website and weblog today before it is too late!

I cannot tell if this is satire or not, very well done

codeulikeon 52 Year old data tape could contain Unix history

Contents of tape:

To Do:

- make it easier to quit Emacs

- change the temporary directory names we've been using - bin sounds like its for unwanted files, dev sounds like its for development, etc needs a better name. Its silly