alt Hacker NewsOne fascinating thing about the whole AI phenomenon is how incredibly hostile it is to _standards_. Whether something works properly, or is ethical, or is true, no longer matters at all; all that matters is "pls use our AI".
Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation. And then set fire to the whole thing in an offering to their robot gods.
And it's not just them. There was a time that Google cared deeply about UX. Now, on macOS Google remaps CMD-G in Google Docs to launch some LLM bullshit (EDIT: huh, they may have fixed this; it was definitely doing it a couple of weeks ago), because, after all, it has only had a standard universal meaning on macOS for about three decades, no big deal.
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> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation. And then set fire to the whole thing in an offering to their robot gods.
Probably they thought the new generations forgot about how awful they were in the not so distant past.
I think they set it all on fire because greed got the better of them again.
The industry spent decades preaching us about power savings, with Microsoft settings application lecturing about power saves and the update app programming them on renewables peak, only for... wasting gigawatts by forcing us to have copilot everywhere.
If Microsoft were consistent, which isn't, power saving mode would disable AI features.
> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation. And then set fire to the whole thing in an offering to their robot gods.
When did this happen?
When I've been working on stuff that requires a SSO login, I noticed that it makes, what I considered, hostile anti-user choices in defaulting to tracking pieces of information I didn't want to track and hadn't mentioned.
Fair that I didn't instruct it explicitly to make more pro-user choices, it just seemed to think slurping as much information into the backend was an default intention. Wasted a few more tokens to iterate on it to remove things, but it was IMO interesting enough that I finally submitted feedback around what I imagine is an interesting training problem.
Has always been the case. Corporations hate standards and would rather lock you in except where market forces prevent them. It was a miracle we have something like the internet - and the government had to create it.
Microsoft's decade-long PR rehabilitation has worked wonders for them.
> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation.
Mmm... I think I missed that part.
GMAIL in the web is so shitty, I literally switched over to another provider. I don't know how anyone can use them as their webmail client. You can't make sense of longer mail threads with forwards, answers etc. in between - it becomes an unreadable hot mess.
> There was a time that Google cared deeply about UX.
I’m sure Google cares very much about UX as a funnel into their ad brokerage, but was there some time when they cared about it in the user’s interest?
Maybe that magical moment when the results page showed the results first?
> And it's not just them. There was a time that Google cared deeply about UX
Are we talking about the same Google? They still haven't fixed Android gesture navigation after almost a decade.
The thing the annoys me the most (to use polite language) is that product design went off the window with the AI craze. You could probably ship actual products that actual people would want to use, but instead everyone wants to turn everything into a chatbot, as if chatbots are the pinnacle of user interface, the crabs of software, the purpose, goal, and telos of technology. It drives me nuts.
The only question is "number go up?": will this result in more money from investors or not?
Its even worse in my eyes, they dont even offer a model they themselves maintain.
Yeah, even .NET is now plagued with AI, see AI dashboard on Aspire, AI components on Blazor, .NET upgrade assistant now being AI agent,....
VSCode hasn't yet been rebranded into VS CoPilot by pure luck.
> And then set fire to the whole thing in an offering to their robot gods.
It's the bourgeoisie dream: A means of production that also does the labor 24/7 and can't complain, infinitely spawnable. Theoretical slavery+, so of course they're throwing everything into the furnace for it.
Not that surprising when you consider the monumental investments. It's heinous but right in line with modern corporate business ethics.
Claude code not supporting specifying an alternate location to look for agent skills is another example.
The entire selling point is "you no longer have to conform to standards in input to get usable output"; why would they conform to standards in output, or in process?
Sent from iPhone
Wait, when did they rehabilitate their reputation? Before AI they were already shoving crap down our throats through windows 11.
What do you mean, there are many, perhaps too many, AI standards. MCP, SKILLS.md, A2A, two different ACPs, ECA.
The pile of money they set on fire is still burning and they are desperate to get returns before it burns out
This particular change feels... human driven.
AI is the ultimate grifting tool, grifters gonna grift.
> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation.
TRYING to rehabilitate. only fools fell for it
> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation
Which literal 20+ year period was that?
> all that matters is "pls use our AI".
If you look at the staggering amounts of money that have been put into the tech, this attitude becomes practically mandatory, in an inhuman sense. They have to get ROI, at literally any cost. And it shows.
> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation.
"Decades" is a stretch. There was a brief window around the Windows 7/8 era and then, like a dog returning to his vomit, they returned to their user-hostile bullshit. Windows 11 is the culmination of that, but Windows 10 was plenty bad. Remember how Windows 10 made Solitaire a subscription service? Sticking copilot into everything is just more of the same.
What did Command+G do in OSX? Online results are saying it "advances to the next search result after doing find". In other OS', that's just the enter key, if I am understanding the context correctly.
> There was a time that Google cared deeply about UX
Have we been using the same Google?
It's a complete takeover of technically incompetent management that feels like it can finally execute their ideas to the fullest instead of relying on those pesky swengs with their obstructions, complaints and problems. We'll soon get the management utopia everywhere.