And the ongoing implementation of misfeatures that just add instability to the OS. These "StartMenuExperienceHost" failures? WTH is the start menu 'experience' and why would I want it? Just give me the fscking Start Menu and have it do what its name implies without any bells and whistles; if I wanted some AI-curated selection of what the system thinks I want to do, I could just dump a pile of fewmets on my keyboard and get the 'experience' directly.

You're confusing the task with the mechanism. Classic autoconplete uses statistical methods, often using some variant of a Bayesian algorithm. The task is to predict the next word, the method is statistics.

But if I asked *you* to predict the next word in a sentence, you would not be using a simple statistical method. Neither is the AI. It doesn't have the breadth of multi domain training data that your neutral network has, so it doesn't really think like a human does, but the way it functions is much closer to your brain than it is to a classical autoconplete.

It's hard to stress enough how profound that difference is.

A thought just occurred to me... could Microsoft relying more and more on AI-generated code explain some of the increasing enshittification of Windows? And Microsoft execs asking AI to tell them what new 'features' to add to Windows account for most of the rest?

If there is a limit on the size of the config file used to identify automated traffic, then the process for updating it needs to save the updated file in temporary storage and sanity-check it; if it fails the sanity check, it should throw an error and reject the update. If it passes the sanity check, the old file should be backed up, and only then should the updated file be moved to replace the old one. That way, if there's an identifiably out-of-band update, it doesn't stomp on the current good data, and even if it passes the initial check, the previous iteration of the file is immediately recoverable to restore service. And there should be a utility that copies -- not moves -- the backup file back to the main file.

A trash can full of shit with flies swirling over it?

"Don't Be Evil... unless we can do it covertly."

Sounds like a great idea!
With the best of intentions!
What could possibly go wrong?

The "We think that some of you might be passing around illegal material, so it is imperative that we be given the power to invasively look at everyone's private communications. We're only going to be looking for this one narrow category of illegal material, and we won't look at anything else. Honest. You can trust us not to abuse this." declaration using the justification "we have to protect the children !" is one of the most abusable power grabs ever. Once a government has the power to read all your communications looking for one thing some individuals may be breaking the law by doing, there's nothing preventing them from saying "Well, we're already reading their communications to find this, so we can just look for this other thing, too, as long as we have their communications" and extending their strip-mining of those communications looking for anything else the government might want to prohibit, starting with other illegal activity and becoming more and more invasive until they're looking for anyone saying something that might be considered to be simply critical of the government.

Paying someone to review the AI's assessments will wind up being cheaper than paying out the settlements on the lawsuits for 'overenthusiastic' police officers forcing a child to their knees, cuffing them, and searching them after a false accusation. And, presumably, the number of times that the AI will trigger on such an event will be small, allowing the human tasked with reviewing AI positives to perform other duties when not actively fielding an AI system's misperceptions.

Microsoft: "Here's our crappiest idea, hosted by Clippy!"

Crappiest mascot, crappiest idea, and crappiest investment: MSFT

Short MSFT

Why not demand 2,000% or 100,000%?

These are just as likely as demanding 30%

Base...Base.

Base.

All Your Base...Are Belong to Us.

The farm-vs-city differential goes back centuries -- look at Edward Jenner and his discovery that farm girls, who worked closely with the animals, would contract cowpox but wouldn't contract smallpox afterward, and developed the technique of variolation to introduce cowpox to uninfected individuals, and acquired immunity to smallpox. But smallpox remained a threat in urban areas until variolation, and later vaccination, became common.

The EV manufacturers could always adopt the Chinese innovation to protect the occupants of an EV in the event of a battery breakdown and fire being detected -- add a mechanism to eject the battery to the side of the vehicle, where it becomes an SEP (Somebody Else's Problem) -- but the occupants are safe from the battery pack immolating itself.

Don't forget the cost of the battery storage system needed to accumulate enough energy to recharge the farm's vehicles, so they don't have to sit plugged into a solar array for days to be usable for a half day. And the farm vehicles need to operate even when the weather is uncooperative -- fully overcast days when the solar array is producing at 10% of its rated capacity. You see solar operators flogging their installation of X hundred megawatts of solar panels... and never admit that that's their rated maximum capacity, and the long-term production rate will be a third or less of that rate, even assuming that they're in a location that's optimal for solar irradiance.