Half the world runs on VBA for Office applications (or used to, it's probably less now), and VBA for Office has never been officially supported by Microsoft. You're on your own if you choose to use it.

> It was possible to run the entire Windows XP system plus user applications on 128MB of RAM... 256MB was a luxury.

I did an experiment once. Windows NT 3.5 could boot with 12MB of RAM. You really couldn't do anything with it, but it did boot up. As I recall, the whole OS only took up about 40MB of disk space.

LLMs have never been rules-based "agents," and they never will be. They cannot internalize arbitrary guidelines and abide by them unerringly, nor can they make qualitative decisions about which rule(s) to follow in the face of conflict. The nature of attention windows means that models are actively ignoring context, including "rules", which is why they can't follow them, and conflict resolution requires intelligence, which they do not possess, and which even intelligent beings frequently fail to do effectively. Social "error correction" tools for rule-breaking include learning from mistakes, which agents cannot do, and individualized ostracization/segregation (firing, jail, etc.), which is also not something we can do with LLMs.

So the only way to achieve rule-following behavior is to deterministically enforce limits on what LLMs can do, akin to a firewall. This is not exactly straightforward either, especially if you don't have fine-grained enough controls in the first place. For example, you could deterministically remove the capability of an agent to delete emails, but you couldn't easily scope that restriction to only "work emails," for example. They would need to be categorized appropriately, external to the agent, and the agent's control surface would need to thoroughly limit the ability to delete any email tagged as "work", or to change or remove the "work" tag, and ensure that the "work" tag deny rule takes priority over any other "allow" rules, AND prevent the agent from changing the rules by any means.

Essentially, this is an entirely new threat model, where neither agentic privilege nor agentic trust cleanly map to user privilege or user trust. At the same time, the more time spent fine-tuning rules and controls, the less useful agentic automation becomes. At some point you're doing at least as much work as the agent, if not more, and the whole point of "individualized" agentic behavior inherently means that any given set of fine-tuned rules are not broadly applicable. On top of that, the end result of agentic behavior might even be worse than the outcome of human performance to boot, which means more work for worse results.

> "Our vehicles are giant paperweights right now through no fault of ours," one wrote on Reddit.

No fault? None at all? That seems... counter-intuitive.

I get it that the technology failed spectacularly, and that this is a serious problem for which people need to be held to account, but my car is working just fine.

After a few months of Windows 95, I switched to NT 3.5. Much better.

Unintended consequences are the most common consequences. Once you take that into account, the world makes a lot more sense. I totally get what you're talking about, though. I felt the same way when I first read "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom", and thought "whuffie" could be a really interesting idea if actually implemented. Eventually, I really I realized it's just as bad as stuff like Polymarket is turning out to be. Pure democracy has a way of always spiraling out of control.

What are you talking about? It does that kind of thing _now_.

I work for a Microsoft shop and use Copilot a lot. When I have a hard question, I use Claude Opus, otherwise ChatGPT is fine.

Dude's got an impressive CV, no doubt. Using this to slam Microsoft is lame. He's written a ton of impressive code, literally using it as a CV to get a job at Microsoft (with SysInternals, nee WinInternals).

I hate how "ask" is now used as a noun. Although that's been around for at least 10 years.

To be fair, a lot of scientific endeavors are using "Don't Build the Torment Nexus" as blueprint... to build the Torment Nexus. I think we're safe with respect to our downfall being perpetrated by something with an appropriately villainous name.

Fuck you and that Ribbon.

I'm sorry. This is a topic that makes me nerd-rage.

LK

How in the fuck does using 15% of the screen for a ribbon provide a compact interface when the menu bar is the competition?

LK

I'm so happy to hear of how many people are expressing this same sentiment.

I absolutely abhor the Ribbon interface. I don't care what their market research shows. I don't care what their shills and evangelists say. I do not like it. It's not intuitive at all.

LK

I have hated the Ribbon interface since it became the default. I use LibreOffice specifically to avoid having to use it.

LK