7 ms·

> “Intellisense with AI now available on VS Code” is Microsoft’s nice way of saying “We harvest the shit out of your data”. What? The IntelliCode description s

> “Intellisense with AI now available on VS Code” is Microsoft’s nice way of saying “We harvest the shit out of your data”. What? The IntelliCode description says that "Contextual recommendations are based on practices developed in thousands of high quality, open-source projects on GitHub each with high star ratings.". I'm not clear on how you think Microsoft will harvest data from doing this - much less how it is related to ads.

spectramax 7y ago
There is telemetry built into VS Code that you can turn off, but it is turned on by default. There is no way to know how they're using that data. Microsoft also collects data on Office365 platform and even local Office 2019 installs. I was trying was to make a tongue in cheek point, rather than specifically digging into exact methods of how they collect data. You may be right but it is besides the core issue we are discussing here. At the end, it is irrelevant how they're collecting data - all you need to know is this: https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en-us https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en-us
- TheIronYuppie 7y ago
  We don't do any training on your data. Telemetry is largely for feature use tracking (eg we should really do better around this component, everyone is using it). There is absolutely no ads overlap at all. Literally none. Disclosure: I work at Azure but not on VS Code
  - spectramax 7y ago
    Thank you for the insight. Would you know if this is written somewhere on the VS Code homepage or privacy policy? I think it should be highlighted!
    - TheIronYuppie 7y ago
      Yep - here! https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/gdpr-dsr-visual-studio-family https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/gd...
  - komali2 7y ago
    Is there a way we can see what data specifically is being sent to your servers from our local VSCode installations?
    - AdamTReineke 7y ago
      (Disclaimer, work at Microsoft. Not on VS Code.) I expect you should be able to run Fiddler or Wireshark or similar traffic sniffers to see the requests.
      - spectramax 7y ago
        I presume these requests are encrypted? So, it is hard to know what exactly is being sent.
      - yellowapple 7y ago
        At least in theory, it shouldn't be necessary to go to such an extreme, considering that VS Code is ostensibly FOSS and thus readily auditable for this sort of thing: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode This assumes, of course, that y'all aren't doing any weird code-injecting funny business when packaging it up for installation :)
    - CodeCube 7y ago
      Check the docs here :) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/gdpr-dsr-visual-studio-family#personal-data-we-collect https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/gd...
  - AJ007 7y ago
    What people want to hear is there is none, and there never will be. Even that isn’t enough, but at least there is some legal recourse.
    - icxa 7y ago
      We need to stop relying on the assertions Big Tech make about themselves, and work towards regulation. What most viewers saw during the Facebook congressional hearing was woefully out of touch, forgive me for using this phrase “old white guys” questioning Mark with many facepalm-able moments. But the house hearing, which includes 40 representatives from the Millennial generation, who grew up on tech, asked much better questions. It just got swallowed up by the news cycle because the Manafort Raid was happening at the same time as hearing about the Cambridge Analytica scandal was occuring. All of this is still new. Banking, Finance, Real Estate, those are all well regulated at this point and arguably much more sophisticated or complex. The situation we have now with the Googles, Amazons, Microsoft, Facebooks of the world packaging up our metadata, combining it with other third party data, training AI, etc is all new, and those who are knowledgeable about it are just now making it into congress, so I am optimistic we will start to see real regulation on these shameful business practices soon. Roger McNamee had an excellent conversation on the Sam Harris podcast recently about all of this. It was a very good conversation and one I highly recommend listening to.
    - TheIronYuppie 7y ago
      Can you say more? Like there is none what? If there are any changes to this doc - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/gdpr-dsr-visual-studio-family https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/gd... - you would be able to check that immediately, and we would never change our data collection policy without changing that document... It's the law! Disclosure: I work at Azure on machine learning but not VS Code
      - ionised 7y ago
        He means no telemetry. None whatsoever. At the very least a default opt-out.
  - thereare5lights 7y ago
    Is there any way we can verify this?
    - scrollaway 7y ago
      If you can't trust Microsoft employees saying it, then it's most likely you won't be able to trust anything short of running Wireshark to verify the outgoing data, no?
    - TheIronYuppie 7y ago
      For better or worse, here - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/gdpr-dsr-visual-studio-family https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/gd... However, if you don't trust us (and I get it!) Your best bet is just to opt out which you can do at any time, including during install. Disclosure: I work at AZure on machine learning but not VS Code
    - e12e 7y ago
      If in the EU you could ask for all collected data under the GDPR. [ed: all personal data - so there might be some set of aggregated, non-identifable data that they might not be required by gdpr to allow insight to - that is however a pretty high bar to clear (and intertwines with being allowed to sample / collect that data in the first place, informed concent, defaulting to not collecting data (opt-in) etc]
  - rurp 7y ago
    A big tech company harvesting extensive user data by default and saying it's ok because "Trust us, we don't do anything bad with it" is not a compelling argument these days. Even if it's true (and that's a big if), that says nothing about what Microsoft will do with the data tomorrow, or the next day.
    - TheIronYuppie 7y ago
      It's on by default, but literally the first thing we ask you, actively, is about giving us feedback and let you turn it off right then. It's not remotely hidden. I totally understand, though about trust. We've been asking users for feedback for 20+ years, I hope we've shown ourselves to be good actors! Disclosure: I work at Azure on machine learning
      - pm90 7y ago
        @ThIronYuppie Let me say first of all that I really appreciate your sincerity and belief in the Goodness of the company that you work for. The issue is not insincerity, but: * a lack of trust in corporations in today's economic and political climate and * the skyrocketing growth of the online advertising business, which has made user data quite literally the gold mines of the digital age The incentives today are very very well aligned for a corporation to sell user data. Even if a company may mostly be made of good people, without explicitly written contracts or declarations of any kind, a Company can change internal policies rather quickly. Maybe there will be a manager who sees the selling of that data as a way to boost profit and rise within the company. Maybe the company sells that division along with their data.
        kohtatsu 7y ago
        s/gold/oil/
        ionised 7y ago
        You say the issue is not insincerity but I beg to differ. Microsoft has never been particularly sincere about the reasons it does the things it does. It has been a deceitful bully of a company for a long time. Indeed, one of the main reasons why there is so little trust in corporations is because they are so insincere, anti-consumer and lacking in any kind of social conscience.
  - mwilsonthomas 7y ago
    You can read more about exactly how the IntelliCode feature uses telemetry and data here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/intellicode/intellicode-visual-studio#telemetry https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/intellicode/in... - No user-defined code is sent to Microsoft, but we do collect information about your use of the IntelliCode results. For base model suggestions, which are open source or .NET types and members, we capture whether you selected an IntelliCode suggestion and log the name of the suggestion. Microsoft uses the data to monitor the quality of the base model. For custom models, we capture whether you selected an IntelliCode suggestion but do not log the names of your user-defined types or methods. Thanks Mark Wilson-Thomas Program Manager Visual Studio IntelliCode
- mhermher 7y ago
  Whew! For a second I thought MS might be selling information on what type of variable names I use to advertisers.
  - bitL 7y ago
    Nah, it's more like automating you away once significant part of your coding process is replicated by AI in the future and then selling your replacement/virtual clone to your employer at a lower cost :-P I guess at some point there will be a replacement/clone store and any company could add 'mhermher'-style coding to their own projects by purchasing clone there. Internally ranked and price exponentially rising the more capable replacement is (e.g. ACM ICPC winning replacements will cost millions).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- graycat 7y ago
  I'm a Windows desktop user, XP, 7, and 10. That's what I want, a DESKTOP. I don't have a smart phone. I may soon buy a $20 mobile flip phone. I have nothing from Apple. For my own general purpose computing, I want Windows desktop especially with its backwards compatibility. For business, I'm doing a startup which for the users is a Web site, and I wrote the code on XP and will run it on 7 as my server until I switch over to Windows Server. I've done nothing with Unix or Linux. In the past 10 years, I've typed in about 400,000 lines of text as software, with about 100,000 program language statements. For the compiled code, it's essentially all Visual Basic .NET with ASP.NET for Web pages and ADO.NET for getting to SQL Server database. I like VB.NET. I did my startup Web pages with ASP.NET -- seems fine to me although they are my first Web pages and I;m no Web page expert. E.g., I wrote no JavaScript although ASP.NET writes a little for me which is optional. For a cloud, for now I'd be concerned about cost, startup time, and security. Later I'll be concerned about security. I tried Visual Studio for a few minutes and gave up on it. I've used no integrated development environment and have no desire to. My two most important tools are my favorite text editor KEdit and my favorite scripting language Rexx. I type my code into KEdit and have a lot of KEdit macros to help me with the code. The code for my Web site is about 100,000 lines of typing and about 24,000 programming language statements -- I had no trouble debugging and never wanted anything like Visual Studio. I wouldn't use Visual Studio for free -- too much botheration for too little need. When I looked at Visual Studio, I could find no reasonable, usable, competent documentation, and no way do I want to take out months to figure out like a puzzle and document Visual Studio for my own use. E.g., Microsoft keeps talking about "intelisense" as if I should already know what that meant and would like it. Of course, I can't look up intellisense in a dictionary, and absolutely, positively, with feet locked four feet down in reinforced concrete will Microsoft refuse to document, describe, and explain what they mean by intellisense. It is as if their gibberish not in any dictionary has self-evident meaning and value -- it has neither. Grotesque, outrageous, inarticulate, incompetent, sick-o communications. It turns out, ASP.NET is super easy to debug -- just give the .ASPX file to a Web browser and let ASP code do its things. For Office and e-mail, I use my legal copy of Office 2003 with Outlook. Now that I have good, extensive notes on how to adjust the settings and options on Outlook, I can do the setups in an hour instead of the several days as before; it's fine. There are some improvements I could think of, but I doubt that Microsoft would be interested. It might be that I could program the improvements with the old VBA which might be able to read and parse an Outlook PST file, but so far I've never tried VBA and when I did want to try it didn't have a copy. For Excel, I use it to draw simple graphs and otherwise regard it as worthless -- I'd much rather write code in Rexx, VB.NET, Fortran, PL/I, etc. and then use Excel to draw the plots. My understanding is that now there is much better graph drawing software, likely with API's, or better API's, than Excel. For high quality word whacking, I use D. Knuth's original TeX and love it. I hate Word -- used it some, got okay with it, but hate it. Lessons: To me, for my personal computing and for business, I want the full power of a good desktop computer. I place high value on backward compatibility, e.g., back to Office 2003, an old Watcom Fortran, an old IBM OSL (Optimization Subroutine Library) to be called from Watcom Fortran, KEdit, Open Object Rexx, etc. For business and software development, VB.NET is fine. Far and away my greatest gripe with computing, the computer industry, and Microsoft is documentation -- on average, the quality of the documentation is awful. To me, the biggest problem in my startup, by far, is poor documentation. Broadly the poor documentation has commonly taken me 100-200 hours to do things I should have been able to do in one hour. So, I DO write my own notes and then AM able to do the stuff in one hour. The bad documentation is close to killing my startup. Long since I should have been sending six figures a year to Microsoft for licenses on their software, and the main reason I'm not is their documentation. E.g., it took me two weeks of full time mud wrestling JUST to find a connection string that worked with SQL Server -- should have taken 10 minutes. Recently I spent 80 hours full time getting simple file sharing, as a first time user, between my 7 and 10 systems. I wrote up notes for myself that will solve the problem for any first time user in less than an hour. I posted the notes on TechNet. Responses from others were awful, e.g., kept talking about Workgroups and Homegroups and some Windows password tool, ALL of which are just irrelevant down to next to useless. Apparently nearly no one still actually knows how to use the simple, well designed, command line NET commands to set up first time user file sharing. The old NET documentation is also awful, gets a grade of flat F in just simple Bachus-Nauer syntax notation 101 and totally omits anything about semantics, meaning, usage, understanding, security, consequences, timeouts, etc. I had so much trouble with even simple things with SQL Server that eventually I got help, really simple answers, from some high up SQL Server executive. To me, the most serious problem blocking information technology, computing, Microsoft, and my work is BAD DOCUMENTATION. When Microsoft learns how to describe their work, then I'll start to consider if they are a competent, functioning company with a bright future.
baybal2 7y ago
Fuzzy logic, hamming scoring, and markov chains suddenly became "AI" now... They don't need your telemetry for that
- jlarocco 7y ago
  Yawn. "AI" has always, and probably always will be, a marketing term to sell other algorithms.
- falcor84 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure these approaches were considered AI from the very start. If anything, algorithms stop being referred to as intelligent over time, as our expectations of what is possible grow.
jlarocco 7y ago
> "Contextual recommendations are based on practices developed in thousands of high quality, open-source projects on GitHub each with high star ratings." Wait, what? Is there a way to opt out of that in GitHub? I don't want their AI to scan my code. Realistically, since most of my GH code is Common Lisp with few stars, I doubt it's looking anyway, but I'd like to make sure. I'm sure it's covered in their TOS, but as a (still) paying GitHub customer I don't want them to do that with my repos.
- lozenge 7y ago
  Just change the license file until GitHub doesn't recognise the license any more.
- lightbyte 7y ago
  Don't make your repos public if you don't want people reading them
- hirsin 7y ago
  Should have nothing to do with github and everything to do with you putting your code on the internet with a permissive license. Google or Eclipse could do this too (and I expect they do, since it's the best corpus of code available).
  - phillipcarter 7y ago
    Google does, in a way, with the GitHub data set in BigQuery -> https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/#sample_tables https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/#sample_tables
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  Is it publicly hosted on Github with a permissive license?
- wanderer2323 7y ago
  I disagree with the paren't sentiment but I think they raise an interesting point: is/should there be a license that says: you can read/use/modify {this} but you cannot use it as a training data for the AI. {this} can be code or text or an image or any other content.

spectramax 7y ago

There is telemetry built into VS Code that you can turn off, but it is turned on by default. There is no way to know how they're using that data. Microsoft also collects data on Office365 platform and even local Office 2019 installs. I was trying was to make a tongue in cheek point, rather than specifically digging into exact methods of how they collect data. You may be right but it is besides the core issue we are discussing here. At the end, it is irrelevant how they're collecting data - all you need to know is this: https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en-us https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en-us

TheIronYuppie 7y ago
We don't do any training on your data. Telemetry is largely for feature use tracking (eg we should really do better around this component, everyone is using it). There is absolutely no ads overlap at all. Literally none. Disclosure: I work at Azure but not on VS Code
- spectramax 7y ago
  Thank you for the insight. Would you know if this is written somewhere on the VS Code homepage or privacy policy? I think it should be highlighted!
  - TheIronYuppie 7y ago
    Yep - here! https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/gdpr-dsr-visual-studio-family https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/gd...
- komali2 7y ago
  Is there a way we can see what data specifically is being sent to your servers from our local VSCode installations?
  - AdamTReineke 7y ago
    (Disclaimer, work at Microsoft. Not on VS Code.) I expect you should be able to run Fiddler or Wireshark or similar traffic sniffers to see the requests.
    - spectramax 7y ago
      I presume these requests are encrypted? So, it is hard to know what exactly is being sent.
    - yellowapple 7y ago
      At least in theory, it shouldn't be necessary to go to such an extreme, considering that VS Code is ostensibly FOSS and thus readily auditable for this sort of thing: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode This assumes, of course, that y'all aren't doing any weird code-injecting funny business when packaging it up for installation :)
  - CodeCube 7y ago
    Check the docs here :) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/gdpr-dsr-visual-studio-family#personal-data-we-collect https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/gd...
- AJ007 7y ago
  What people want to hear is there is none, and there never will be. Even that isn’t enough, but at least there is some legal recourse.
  - icxa 7y ago
    We need to stop relying on the assertions Big Tech make about themselves, and work towards regulation. What most viewers saw during the Facebook congressional hearing was woefully out of touch, forgive me for using this phrase “old white guys” questioning Mark with many facepalm-able moments. But the house hearing, which includes 40 representatives from the Millennial generation, who grew up on tech, asked much better questions. It just got swallowed up by the news cycle because the Manafort Raid was happening at the same time as hearing about the Cambridge Analytica scandal was occuring. All of this is still new. Banking, Finance, Real Estate, those are all well regulated at this point and arguably much more sophisticated or complex. The situation we have now with the Googles, Amazons, Microsoft, Facebooks of the world packaging up our metadata, combining it with other third party data, training AI, etc is all new, and those who are knowledgeable about it are just now making it into congress, so I am optimistic we will start to see real regulation on these shameful business practices soon. Roger McNamee had an excellent conversation on the Sam Harris podcast recently about all of this. It was a very good conversation and one I highly recommend listening to.
  - TheIronYuppie 7y ago
    Can you say more? Like there is none what? If there are any changes to this doc - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/gdpr-dsr-visual-studio-family https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/gd... - you would be able to check that immediately, and we would never change our data collection policy without changing that document... It's the law! Disclosure: I work at Azure on machine learning but not VS Code
    - ionised 7y ago
      He means no telemetry. None whatsoever. At the very least a default opt-out.
- thereare5lights 7y ago
  Is there any way we can verify this?
  - scrollaway 7y ago
    If you can't trust Microsoft employees saying it, then it's most likely you won't be able to trust anything short of running Wireshark to verify the outgoing data, no?
  - TheIronYuppie 7y ago
    For better or worse, here - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/gdpr-dsr-visual-studio-family https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/gd... However, if you don't trust us (and I get it!) Your best bet is just to opt out which you can do at any time, including during install. Disclosure: I work at AZure on machine learning but not VS Code
  - e12e 7y ago
    If in the EU you could ask for all collected data under the GDPR. [ed: all personal data - so there might be some set of aggregated, non-identifable data that they might not be required by gdpr to allow insight to - that is however a pretty high bar to clear (and intertwines with being allowed to sample / collect that data in the first place, informed concent, defaulting to not collecting data (opt-in) etc]
- rurp 7y ago
  A big tech company harvesting extensive user data by default and saying it's ok because "Trust us, we don't do anything bad with it" is not a compelling argument these days. Even if it's true (and that's a big if), that says nothing about what Microsoft will do with the data tomorrow, or the next day.
  - TheIronYuppie 7y ago
    It's on by default, but literally the first thing we ask you, actively, is about giving us feedback and let you turn it off right then. It's not remotely hidden. I totally understand, though about trust. We've been asking users for feedback for 20+ years, I hope we've shown ourselves to be good actors! Disclosure: I work at Azure on machine learning
    - pm90 7y ago
      @ThIronYuppie Let me say first of all that I really appreciate your sincerity and belief in the Goodness of the company that you work for. The issue is not insincerity, but: * a lack of trust in corporations in today's economic and political climate and * the skyrocketing growth of the online advertising business, which has made user data quite literally the gold mines of the digital age The incentives today are very very well aligned for a corporation to sell user data. Even if a company may mostly be made of good people, without explicitly written contracts or declarations of any kind, a Company can change internal policies rather quickly. Maybe there will be a manager who sees the selling of that data as a way to boost profit and rise within the company. Maybe the company sells that division along with their data.
      - kohtatsu 7y ago
        s/gold/oil/
      - ionised 7y ago
        You say the issue is not insincerity but I beg to differ. Microsoft has never been particularly sincere about the reasons it does the things it does. It has been a deceitful bully of a company for a long time. Indeed, one of the main reasons why there is so little trust in corporations is because they are so insincere, anti-consumer and lacking in any kind of social conscience.
- mwilsonthomas 7y ago
  You can read more about exactly how the IntelliCode feature uses telemetry and data here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/intellicode/intellicode-visual-studio#telemetry https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/intellicode/in... - No user-defined code is sent to Microsoft, but we do collect information about your use of the IntelliCode results. For base model suggestions, which are open source or .NET types and members, we capture whether you selected an IntelliCode suggestion and log the name of the suggestion. Microsoft uses the data to monitor the quality of the base model. For custom models, we capture whether you selected an IntelliCode suggestion but do not log the names of your user-defined types or methods. Thanks Mark Wilson-Thomas Program Manager Visual Studio IntelliCode
mhermher 7y ago
Whew! For a second I thought MS might be selling information on what type of variable names I use to advertisers.
- bitL 7y ago
  Nah, it's more like automating you away once significant part of your coding process is replicated by AI in the future and then selling your replacement/virtual clone to your employer at a lower cost :-P I guess at some point there will be a replacement/clone store and any company could add 'mhermher'-style coding to their own projects by purchasing clone there. Internally ranked and price exponentially rising the more capable replacement is (e.g. ACM ICPC winning replacements will cost millions).
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
graycat 7y ago
I'm a Windows desktop user, XP, 7, and 10. That's what I want, a DESKTOP. I don't have a smart phone. I may soon buy a $20 mobile flip phone. I have nothing from Apple. For my own general purpose computing, I want Windows desktop especially with its backwards compatibility. For business, I'm doing a startup which for the users is a Web site, and I wrote the code on XP and will run it on 7 as my server until I switch over to Windows Server. I've done nothing with Unix or Linux. In the past 10 years, I've typed in about 400,000 lines of text as software, with about 100,000 program language statements. For the compiled code, it's essentially all Visual Basic .NET with ASP.NET for Web pages and ADO.NET for getting to SQL Server database. I like VB.NET. I did my startup Web pages with ASP.NET -- seems fine to me although they are my first Web pages and I;m no Web page expert. E.g., I wrote no JavaScript although ASP.NET writes a little for me which is optional. For a cloud, for now I'd be concerned about cost, startup time, and security. Later I'll be concerned about security. I tried Visual Studio for a few minutes and gave up on it. I've used no integrated development environment and have no desire to. My two most important tools are my favorite text editor KEdit and my favorite scripting language Rexx. I type my code into KEdit and have a lot of KEdit macros to help me with the code. The code for my Web site is about 100,000 lines of typing and about 24,000 programming language statements -- I had no trouble debugging and never wanted anything like Visual Studio. I wouldn't use Visual Studio for free -- too much botheration for too little need. When I looked at Visual Studio, I could find no reasonable, usable, competent documentation, and no way do I want to take out months to figure out like a puzzle and document Visual Studio for my own use. E.g., Microsoft keeps talking about "intelisense" as if I should already know what that meant and would like it. Of course, I can't look up intellisense in a dictionary, and absolutely, positively, with feet locked four feet down in reinforced concrete will Microsoft refuse to document, describe, and explain what they mean by intellisense. It is as if their gibberish not in any dictionary has self-evident meaning and value -- it has neither. Grotesque, outrageous, inarticulate, incompetent, sick-o communications. It turns out, ASP.NET is super easy to debug -- just give the .ASPX file to a Web browser and let ASP code do its things. For Office and e-mail, I use my legal copy of Office 2003 with Outlook. Now that I have good, extensive notes on how to adjust the settings and options on Outlook, I can do the setups in an hour instead of the several days as before; it's fine. There are some improvements I could think of, but I doubt that Microsoft would be interested. It might be that I could program the improvements with the old VBA which might be able to read and parse an Outlook PST file, but so far I've never tried VBA and when I did want to try it didn't have a copy. For Excel, I use it to draw simple graphs and otherwise regard it as worthless -- I'd much rather write code in Rexx, VB.NET, Fortran, PL/I, etc. and then use Excel to draw the plots. My understanding is that now there is much better graph drawing software, likely with API's, or better API's, than Excel. For high quality word whacking, I use D. Knuth's original TeX and love it. I hate Word -- used it some, got okay with it, but hate it. Lessons: To me, for my personal computing and for business, I want the full power of a good desktop computer. I place high value on backward compatibility, e.g., back to Office 2003, an old Watcom Fortran, an old IBM OSL (Optimization Subroutine Library) to be called from Watcom Fortran, KEdit, Open Object Rexx, etc. For business and software development, VB.NET is fine. Far and away my greatest gripe with computing, the computer industry, and Microsoft is documentation -- on average, the quality of the documentation is awful. To me, the biggest problem in my startup, by far, is poor documentation. Broadly the poor documentation has commonly taken me 100-200 hours to do things I should have been able to do in one hour. So, I DO write my own notes and then AM able to do the stuff in one hour. The bad documentation is close to killing my startup. Long since I should have been sending six figures a year to Microsoft for licenses on their software, and the main reason I'm not is their documentation. E.g., it took me two weeks of full time mud wrestling JUST to find a connection string that worked with SQL Server -- should have taken 10 minutes. Recently I spent 80 hours full time getting simple file sharing, as a first time user, between my 7 and 10 systems. I wrote up notes for myself that will solve the problem for any first time user in less than an hour. I posted the notes on TechNet. Responses from others were awful, e.g., kept talking about Workgroups and Homegroups and some Windows password tool, ALL of which are just irrelevant down to next to useless. Apparently nearly no one still actually knows how to use the simple, well designed, command line NET commands to set up first time user file sharing. The old NET documentation is also awful, gets a grade of flat F in just simple Bachus-Nauer syntax notation 101 and totally omits anything about semantics, meaning, usage, understanding, security, consequences, timeouts, etc. I had so much trouble with even simple things with SQL Server that eventually I got help, really simple answers, from some high up SQL Server executive. To me, the most serious problem blocking information technology, computing, Microsoft, and my work is BAD DOCUMENTATION. When Microsoft learns how to describe their work, then I'll start to consider if they are a competent, functioning company with a bright future.

baybal2 7y ago

Fuzzy logic, hamming scoring, and markov chains suddenly became "AI" now... They don't need your telemetry for that

jlarocco 7y ago
Yawn. "AI" has always, and probably always will be, a marketing term to sell other algorithms.
falcor84 7y ago
I'm pretty sure these approaches were considered AI from the very start. If anything, algorithms stop being referred to as intelligent over time, as our expectations of what is possible grow.

jlarocco 7y ago

> "Contextual recommendations are based on practices developed in thousands of high quality, open-source projects on GitHub each with high star ratings." Wait, what? Is there a way to opt out of that in GitHub? I don't want their AI to scan my code. Realistically, since most of my GH code is Common Lisp with few stars, I doubt it's looking anyway, but I'd like to make sure. I'm sure it's covered in their TOS, but as a (still) paying GitHub customer I don't want them to do that with my repos.

lozenge 7y ago
Just change the license file until GitHub doesn't recognise the license any more.
lightbyte 7y ago
Don't make your repos public if you don't want people reading them
hirsin 7y ago
Should have nothing to do with github and everything to do with you putting your code on the internet with a permissive license. Google or Eclipse could do this too (and I expect they do, since it's the best corpus of code available).
- phillipcarter 7y ago
  Google does, in a way, with the GitHub data set in BigQuery -> https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/#sample_tables https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/#sample_tables
soulofmischief 7y ago
Is it publicly hosted on Github with a permissive license?
wanderer2323 7y ago
I disagree with the paren't sentiment but I think they raise an interesting point: is/should there be a license that says: you can read/use/modify {this} but you cannot use it as a training data for the AI. {this} can be code or text or an image or any other content.