There's a good reason everyone calls them microslop these days. The sooner we're all able to ditch this crappy company, the better - they're actively holding back the tech industry at this point
Yea, I'm in the process of converting our complete ETL infrastructure from SSIS/SQL Server to Python/PostgreSQL. Next step is Office 365, which will be more difficult, but doable since we are a small company anyway.
To be fair, the tech industry been holding itself back for decades now too, since lots of people seemingly have somewhat low prices to go from being a FOSS evangelist to wearing a "Microsoft <3 Open Source" t-shirt.
that's just a byproduct of "job creators" holding the keys to a comfortable life over everyones head.
i dont think its fair to conflate the tech industries self-owns with microsofts damages. microsoft has for decades poured untold resources and money into capturing everything they possibly could to sustain themselves with honestly what i call cultural and software vendor lock. we're only just now seeing the gaming industry take its first real footsteps towards non-windows targets, but for the most part the decades of evangelizing Microsoft apis and bankrolling schools and education systems to carry courses for their way of doing things makes that a particularly uphill battle thats going to take a lot more time. people have built entire careers out of the microsoft-way in multiple industries. pure microsoft houses are still everywhere at many orgs, so many of them don't even recognize that there is another path. there's plenty of infra/dbadmin/devops people who are just pure windows still. there's multiple points where microsoft did have the best in class solution for something, but these days you'd be hard pressed to not go another way if you were starting from scratch. problem is such a lift and shift is really hard to do for orgs that have spent decades being a microsoft shop.
in a roundabout way, this sort of translates to real long lasting impact/damage to me. microsoft has always been such a force over history that it caused a massive rift in computing. no matter how much they embrace linux and claim to not fight the uphill battle of open source anymore, that modus operandi of locking people into their suite of things still exists on so many fronts and is in some ways more in your face than it's ever been. there's no benefit of the doubt to give here, i just have a hard time choosing microsoft for... well anything.
Microsoft has been trying to kill everything in computers that's not-Microsoft, for as long as I've been alive. Their actual power comes and goes, strengthens and weakens, but it's been a continuous background threat to personal computing since the first day something other than Microsoft tried to get traction in the industry.
We can explain it to you, but we can't understand it for you.
Explanation: Microslop is a power hungry, greedy and frankly evil corporation whose only goal is complete financial domination of the government, business, and personal tech industries. They actively promote making regressive software, increasing complexity, and hiding straightforward processes behind an information veil.
Example: Go to learn.microsoft.com and try to actually learn HOW to do anything. You'll read 35 pages of text talking about the concept of working with a specific microslop product but not 1 single explicit example of HOW to accomplish a specific task.
Example: Windows 11
Example: Copilot
The whole company is run by backassward tech hicks and digital yokels who can't think past a dime on the floor for a dollar in customer satisfaction, and somehow they run the majority of non-server space or personal device tech on the planet.
Funny enough, I do read the Copilot Studio and Dynamics Customer Service and Power Platform documentation and understand it.
But reading documentation from any vendor is a skill. Don’t throw me in front of Google or Oracle documentation and expect me to understand it off the bat.
And of course companies in the US are wanting to make money/capture markets. They’re not a charity. None of that has any relation to holding back the industry. Unless you wish to explain how they hold back all FOSS projects.
You don’t need to be rude in your replies. This is HN, not reddit.
Outside of work, I don't use Windows very often if at all. I have a 2017 laptop that Microsoft made, and it is so damn sluggish for absolutely no reason, its VERY VERY vanilla mind you.
How is active directory and excel holding the tech industry back?
Apple is holding the tech industry back by forbidding any browser on iOS except Safari and then refusing to implement any APIs that would allow web applications to compete with their app store. Apple is choosing profit over progress.
i remember years and years ago learning some posix/shell syntax and working in terminal. felt like my love for windows unraveled in real time. these days using windows... feel like i gotta take a shower after. like many i was just raised on windows it was the household operating system i had like 20 years of general computer usage under my belt on windows before i finally felt a mac trackpad for the first time. that hardware experience alone was the first pillar kicked out upholding my "windows is the best" philosophies. then i got into coding, then i tripped and fell out of hourly boeing slave labor into a sql job (lost 55% yearly income, no regrets yo). then i started discovering the open source world, and learned just how much computing goes on outside of the world of windows and how many insanely bright minds are out there contributing to... not microsoft. now i have linux and macos machines everywhere, i still haven't found the bottom but the last 6-7 years or so have been a really rich journey.
currently have a 32bit win xp env spun up in 86box just to compile a project in some omega old visual studio dotnet 7 and the service pack update at the time (don't ask). it is seriously _wild_ being in there, feels like stepping into a time machine. nostalgia aside, the OS is for the most part... quiet. doesn't bother you, everything is kind of exactly where you expect it to be, no noise in my start menu, there isnt some omega bing network callstack in my explorer, no prompts to o365 my life up.
it feels kinda sad, what an era that was. it's just more annoying to do any meaningful work in windows these days.
im currently working with c/cpp the idiot way (nothing about my story is ever conventional sigh), by picking a legacy project from like 22 years ago. this has forced me to step back into old redhat 7.1+icc5, old windows xp + dotnet7 like i explained above, and im definitely taking the most unpragmatic approach ever diving in here.. but there's one thing that absolutely sticks out to me: microsoft has always tried to capitalize on everything. tool? money. vendor lock. os? money. vendor lock. entire industries/education system capture? lotta money. lotta vendor lock. lotta generational knowledge lock.
they are lucky people are still using github. theyve tried to poke the bear a few times and theyre slowly but surely enshittifying the place, but im just kinda losing any reverence for microsoft altogether. microsoft has been big for a hot minute now, they have their eras. you can feel when things are driven by smart visionary engineers working behind the scenes, and you can tell when things are in pure slop mode microservice get rich or die trying mode. yea, microsoft has.. always been vendor-lock aggro and kinda hostile, but the current era microsoft is by far the grossest it's ever been. see: microsoft teams (inb4 "i use teams every day, i dont have a problem with it")
im aware people smarter than me can write diatribes on why windows is the best at x thing, but im only informed by my own experience of having to use all three (linux/macos/windows) for my professional work life: i grew up thinking windows was the best.. now im like mostly confident that windows is actually the worst lol. by a pretty damn decent margin. i was gaslit for ages
Yeah. I felt in a similar manner when I moved to Linux. Microsoft seemed to make people dumber. I do actually use both Linux and Windows (Win10 only), largely for testing various things, including java-related software. But every time I use Windows, I am annoyed at how slow everything is compared to Linux. (I should mention that I compile almost everything from source on Linux, so most of the default Linux stack I don't use; many linux distributions also suck by default, so I have to uncripple the software stack. I also use versioned appdirs similar as to how GoboLinux does, but in a more free form.)
Microsoft has spent most of its life as a corporate bureaucracy that produces sales-and-marketing content, some of which happens to moonlight as software.
Quantum computing, and the generic term 'quantum' is gearing up to be the next speculative investment hype bubble after AI, so prepare for a lot of these kinds of articles
nah. governments around the world are hoovering up traffic today with the hope of a "cheap" (by nation state standards) quantum computer. Some of the secrets sent today are "evergreen" (i.e are still relevant 10+ years into the future), amongst a whole lot of cruft. There is massive incentive to hide the technology to keep your peers transmitting in vulnerable encryption as long as possible.
For sure, that or just ensuring they have laws in place that grant them access to the unencrypted data we are sending to CDNs operating in their jurisdiction (when necessary for national security reasons).
Contracts aren't for handling errors. That blog post is extremely out of date, and doesn't reflect the current state of contracts
Modern C++ contracts are being sold as being purely for debugging. You can't rely on contracts like an assert to catch problems, which is an intentional part of the design of contracts
I definitely get this. The thing that gives me hope is that you only need to poison a very small % of content to damage AI models pretty significantly. It helps combat the mass scraping, because a significant chunk of the data they get will be useless, and its very difficult to filter it by hand
The asymmetry is what makes this very interesting. The cost to inject poison is basically zero for the site owner, but the cost to detect and filter it at scale is significant for the scraper. That math gets a lot worse for them as more sites adopt it. It doesn't solve the problem, but it changes the economics.
I'm not sure why the other reply here was flagged and killed. The US absolutely has NOT acknowledged that they killed school children. The DoW and other government officials have only publicly stated that an investigation is taking place.
This is incorrect. The US government (via Secretary Hegseth) has only confirmed that they are investigating the incident.
What the US has NOT confirmed:
- that they are responsible for the bombing
- who hit the school
- whether the school was an intended target of US strikes
- whether it was struck intentionally
- that it was mistaken for a military site
- any casualty count
- whether there were civilians or children in the casualty count
The US has explicitly DENIED:
- That they deliberately target civilian targets
These are the facts about what the US has actually confirmed. We are all entitled to our opinion of what happened. But we should be able to acknowledge that they are just that: opinions. We don't actually know what happened. And I find it scary and dangerous that so many people, on hacker news and elsewhere, are acting like they do.
Its always extremely funny reading wikipedia articles about a countries customs. For the UK:
>Bread is always served and can be placed on the table cloth itself
This is extremely rare, to the point where I can't remember the last time I saw it. Is bread really.. always served?
> In the United Kingdom, the fork tines face upward while sitting on the table.
Tines down isn't uncommon in the UK either
>if a knife is not needed – such as when eating pasta – the fork can be held in the right hand
I mean it can be, but its fairly uncommon
>it is permissible to place a small piece of bread at the end of the fork for dipping
Its also 100% fine to dip bread in a sauce with your fingers. Putting bread on a fork if you've licked the fork and then dipping the bread would cause everyone to hate you, so *don't do this*
At any kind of formal dining? Yes, absolutely, I would expect there to be a bread roll & a pat of butter served at the beginning of the meal. Both in restaurants & formal dinners in my experience.
It's not an absolute rule though & you generally wouldn't expect bread to be served like this at home in the UK. I think the French are more likely to serve bread at home as well.
> >if a knife is not needed – such as when eating pasta – the fork can be held in the right hand
> I mean it can be, but its fairly uncommon
So the norm is that if you're eating one-handed, you use your non-dominant hand? That seems really counterintuitive to me; is it because you're so used to having the fork in the non-dominant hand that it feels awkward the other way? Which hand do you use when eating with a spoon?
Spoons always go in the right hand (eg fork and spoon), but yes I'd say people usually use the fork in the non dominant hand. Fork in the right hand is slightly 'uncouth', possibly due to its american associations
Far too many people treat AI as a way to launder copyright, it seems likely that a lot of the current state of outright plagiarism won't stand up in court
These cases will be settled out of court long before they ever reach a jury. Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5bn in a class action suit [0]. Others will follow.
Eh, that's a bit of bullshit; I've seen floss Mario/Puzzle Bubble/Pang and such since forever and no one was sued.
Heck, back in the day Rogue was propietary and commercial (and thanks to that we got both the roguelike genre and the Curses library) and yet Hack was born as a libre clone and from Hack we got the now uber known Nethack and forks like Slashem.
Cloning commercial games it's older than Windows 95 itself and probably as old as the NES.
The https://osgameclones.com has so many examples that you whole point gets invalidated since the first Hack release for Unix. And Tetris for Terminals, MSDOS and the like.
Hell, in the 90's everyone in Europe (children of blue collar workers) got a Russian Tetris clone -oh the irony- called Brick Game with often several micro low-res commercial game clones such as for Frogger and Battle Tank. No one sued that company ever, even if the Tetris concept itself was for sure patented and copyrighted.
And that game was probably sold by millions, maybe even more than the Game Boy if we count every clone sold with different plastic cases, because you could get one for the price of a book and today for less than a fast food ration.
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