On the contrary, I think most of your comment is as relevant as ever. A carefully designed UI is still better for almost any specific task than what "agents" will produce. It will probably be more efficient to describe what you want precisely enough to get it right. It will not be undermined by problems like non-repeatability, non-determinism and hallucinations that are inherent in LLM-backed agents.

Agents can be quite effective at getting something that seems about right, as long as you don't care too much about the details. And of course they get there much quicker than doing it manually as a human. This is useful for some tasks, and why they have become popular.

Unfortunately, it turns out that for many of the things we really care about, "about right" doesn't cut it. Right now, today, the software industry is already being overwhelmed by AI slop. It's hard to believe, but it's still only been a few months since agentic development processes arrived on the scene. And yet after just those few months of management trying to replace real developers with agents, we can see the slow-motion train wreck happening right before our eyes. And in return, where are the new applications that radically improve on what we had before thanks to all this added "productivity"? If this tech is going to change the world as the AI tech bros and the sycophantic CxOs kneeling at their feet would have us believe, where's my flying car?

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of AI-generated cybersecurity nightmares...

While your framing of the situation is realistic and grim, I can offer a sliver of hope: there is historical parallel. The "spoils system" worked similarly in the late 1800s with civil service positions being given out to friends and allies of the new administration. James Garfield started ending it, and he was shot by a deranged office-seeker who was frozen out by the end of the spoils system. An unlikely hero emerged in Chester A Arthur, previously a creature of corrupt party machine politics who everyone believed would continue the spoils system after the death of the incorruptible Garfield. Instead he brought about the unequivocal end of the spoils system and signed laws to make it a crime to fire civil servants for political reasons. I daresay, we could use a man like Chester A Arthur again.

It is. The fact that our dominant desktop operating systems are still using security models from last century is probably the #2 disaster of modern tech security, coming in just behind so much software with potential security implications still being written in languages like C and C++ at #1. And the understandable yet still deeply regrettable reason for both disasters is the same: momentum.

I normally connect to all online conference calls via their web UIs. At least then it takes both a screw-up in the communications system and a screw-up in a browser security sandbox that is independently developed to allow something like an RCE or data leakage vulnerability to be exploited.

People have called me crazy for not wanting to install native apps from the likes of Microsoft, Google and Zoom in the modern era of remote working, but every now and then, there's another story like this one that reminds me why I am extremely careful about what native software I install on anything these days.

What, specifically, do you mean by "personal Windows installations"?

Are you suggesting that any business of any size should only ever use Enterprise editions of Windows?

No, I read the details explicitly quoted at the start of the discussion and responded to them.

Are you saying that this episode has not in fact resulted in (a) unplanned software being installed on end devices that will (b) automatically read data that is stored on those devices without the proper approvals? Either of those things alone can easily become a compliance problem if you operate in a regulated environment, whether or not things ultimately go any further on this occasion.

It was obnoxious enough when Microsoft started pushing this kind of unwanted "feature" on home users, then small businesses and professionals on Pro editions. There are real legal and regulatory concerns over this kind of change that businesses have to take seriously. If they've screwed up so badly that even their large corporate customers have been hit by the same thing and there isn't even a good way to undo the damage at the moment, this could lead to meaningful lawsuits from their customers and/or interventions by regulators.

I mean, he's nearly 60 years old, and been CTO of Azure for over a decade. Azure actually became a serious cloud provider (AWS had been outpacing for a while) in short order, and the Azure tools for Windows management are far better than the on-premise NT-era active directory solutions, lest anyone need to spend time in ADSI Edit again.

There are few people pushing 60 who made useful software in the 90s still "doing stuff," at least at the level of impact like he had in that era. It's like lamenting an Army General who won commendations for bravery in the Gulf War isn't manning the artillery or leading tank charges anymore. Even Linus Torvalds no longer writes code, he's effectively a manager.

Mark Russinovich is a GOAT and as an old grey beard you have probably used his software, like sysinternals and psexec. Before he joined Microsoft when they bought his company, every decent Windows NT etc admin in the 90s and 2000s used his third party software. There are few people on earth with such in depth knowledge of the Windows operating system or who have made such useful software for IT. I've been a Linux/posix guy most of my career, but I respect him and when I had to use or administer windows I used his software extensively.

Expect BMW to spin this as offering their customers free heated seats in exchange for viewing ads.

Dude can you read? The total value is plus cash on hand. That said selling at 2.5x ARR is a fire sale.

I put a whole paycheck of about 4k after taxes in ethereum during 2016 and put it on a Trezor hardware wallet where it stayed until last year. I didn't buy more because of the chorus of voices on here and elsewhere talking about how dumb it was. It was the best investment I ever made. That single paycheck now looks like three years' salary (if I was still working). What originally was enough to buy a beat up old Honda can now buy a Ferrari.

"The biggest being that the digitalization of content overall..."

Do they think what's on those discs isn't digital?

>"If we have an influx of workers at this point with the data centers being built, what happens when they're done? Where do those workers go?"

At least skilled trades is one area AI can't take over. For now.