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One fascinating thing about the whole AI phenomenon is how incredibly hostile it is to _standards_. Whether something works properly, or is ethical, or is true,
by rsynnott 6mo ago
One fascinating thing about the whole AI phenomenon is how incredibly hostile it is to _standards_. Whether something works properly, or is ethical, or is true, no longer matters at all; all that matters is "pls use our AI".
Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation. And then set fire to the whole thing in an offering to their robot gods.
And it's not just them. There was a time that Google cared deeply about UX. Now, on macOS Google remaps CMD-G in Google Docs to launch some LLM bullshit (EDIT: huh, they may have fixed this; it was definitely doing it a couple of weeks ago), because, after all, it has only had a standard universal meaning on macOS for about three decades, no big deal.
- lpcvoid 6mo ago[flagged]
- grebc 6mo ago5 years ago it was blockchain & NFT’s. Same hypers just moved to different technology.
- PyWoody 6mo agoAll of the "carbon credit" guys I know are now all in on AI with zero sense of self awareness.
- ExoticPearTree 6mo ago> All of the "carbon credit" guys I know are now all in on AI with zero sense of self awareness. Some people made a lot of money off of those platforms. Everything was a nice story, but once you dug just a wee bit... smoke and mirrors.
- PyWoody 6mo agoThere were definitely honest people trying to make a difference but they were unfortunately _vastly_ overshadowed by grifters.
- thesmtsolver2 6mo agoYep, 25 years ago it was the web. And remember the great electricity grift 100 years ago. And horseless carriage grifters like Ford!
- grebc 6mo agoYeah, you probably said web3 was going to change the web too.
- hparadiz 6mo agoDon't stick your head in the sand just cause one fad didn't play out.
- grebc 6mo agoI’m not, I’m presently underwhelmed by the examples everyone shows. I’m yet to see actual productivity result from people paying to talk to chatbots to generate boilerplate. But I tend to shy away from hypers so the LLM craze is passing me by. I have seen uses of AI/ML that helps recognise objects in images which I have seen it do OK at(and it should because it’s the same image just 10m down the road). A human then reviews the outputs. It also spits out highly inaccurate outputs fairly often that the human is necessary even with a feedback loop.
- 2ndorderthought 6mo agoIn my circles it literally was the same people. Instead of trying to get me to buy ETH they started talking only via LLMs. Unsurprisingly we aren't in touch anymore... Maybe they are happier with their chatbots, I'll never know that's for sure
- furyofantares 6mo agoI'm intensely curious, since you know they're grifters, why are they in your circles? I guess maybe you don't mean circles the way I'm thinking and more the whims of algorithms?
- 2ndorderthought 6mo agoNo I mean social circles Because I am too nice and even though every conversation had an element of grift there was still a conversation. Most of them are lost, or struggling with their identity. Yes there's some greed but half of them just want to fit in somewhere and they aren't technical geniuses despite loving technology. I like people like that, of course with out the grift. That said we don't keep in touch anymore. I do miss them though. I'm something like an abused dog that has seen too many things in their life to not look past all ugliness and see someone's inside. I hang around a lot of hurt people because í want them to have a safe person they can come to if they choose to heal. Wow that's personal. I should stop posting here and go find some new friends.
- furyofantares 6mo agoThanks for sharing.
- grebc 6mo agoPeople get sucked into all sorts of schemes or ideas. I never said grifters but a fair share of my social circle pumped crypto’s/nft’s when they bought some(small amounts but whatever). Same people just can’t shut up about AI/LLM’s. I don’t care your LLM helped you generate an outlook email address export tool when a quick google reveals outlook can export the email address natively with just a few clicks.
- TeriyakiBomb 6mo agoSee how fast so many of the crypto and NFT/Web 3 lot shifted to AI, like rats on a sinking ship. I think VCs saw Crypto and dreamt of being able to create the same amount of irrational value. AI has the same technical complexity "You can't easily explain it in a single sentence" energy but unlike Crypto and NFTs, enough actual utility to not seem completely illegitimate. It literally is the perfect hype grift tool. Crypto has survived almost 20 years off of nonsense, how long can this crap last. sigh
- OutOfHere 6mo agoIf you still think crypto and AI are nonsense, then I guess you will carry these beliefs the rest of your life, but these beliefs won't outlive you, as they have no relation to reality.
- TeriyakiBomb 6mo agoI said AI has utility but drives irrational levels of investment. Crypto has little utility besides a place to gamble, con credulous people and otherwise act as a really shitty store of wealth. Most modern crypto projects barely bother to promise to do anything useful let alone achieve anything useful, which the overwhelming majority do not. These aren't beliefs but statements of fact.
- OutOfHere 6mo ago[flagged]
- TeriyakiBomb 6mo agoOk. Well have fun. Bye.
- thephyber 6mo agoWho is investing in NFTs today? Who is building their company using permission-less blockchain as the database? The average person still uses a bank checking account, not replacing it with a crypto account. I haven’t heard of any progress on tokens in the Governance direction. Stablecoins without a public audit trail have so far stayed relevant, but there are several which are suspiciously reminiscent of the mistakes that SBF made. We all see the transfer of funds and the ostensible store of wealth when it comes to buying influence or presidential pardons. Those of us not wearing crypto-colored glasses don’t see the promise that VCs sold us on the industry 5-10 years ago.
- pjc50 6mo agoThe only question is "number go up?": will this result in more money from investors or not?
- kami23 6mo agoWhen I've been working on stuff that requires a SSO login, I noticed that it makes, what I considered, hostile anti-user choices in defaulting to tracking pieces of information I didn't want to track and hadn't mentioned. Fair that I didn't instruct it explicitly to make more pro-user choices, it just seemed to think slurping as much information into the backend was an default intention. Wasted a few more tokens to iterate on it to remove things, but it was IMO interesting enough that I finally submitted feedback around what I imagine is an interesting training problem.
- pseudohadamard 6mo agoIf you're using Claude, try /grill-me before getting it to start working on things.
- krainboltgreene 6mo ago> And then set fire to the whole thing in an offering to their robot gods. It's the bourgeoisie dream: A means of production that also does the labor 24/7 and can't complain, infinitely spawnable. Theoretical slavery+, so of course they're throwing everything into the furnace for it.
- outside1234 6mo agoBUT it is a trap: https://arxiv.org/html/2603.20617v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2603.20617v1
- whattheheckheck 6mo agoThis feels like the same mechanism for climate change. The actors dont care since they're not completely responsible for that outcome and benefit from ignoring it
- 2ndorderthought 6mo agoOne things for sure I won't be buying any SaaS, streaming, or ordering from Amazon if I have no future prospects for work. I already stopped most of my subscriptions because of a layoff unrelated to AI. We buy food and go for walks as entertainment. It's been refreshing but also obviously scary.
- sdevonoes 6mo agoDidn’t get the “scary” part. I also keep my entertainment to the minimum dependencies possible. I try to rely on stuff I own: music cds, iso videogames + emulators, physical books or ebooks (thanks Anna), exercise outdoors… ditching streaming like netflix/youtube, buying crap on amazon, uber, etc
- thephyber 6mo agoScary = “if I have no future prospects for work” It’s the combination of AI changing the workplace, the large techs shedding double digit headcount, recruiting / hiring departments being so broken by the AI arms race hitting job applications, and the macro business environment generally being on the downward slope at the moment.
- janice1999 6mo agoThey invested billions. They're scared.
- cyanydeez 6mo agoThey invested billions. They can exit in 6 months if this thing stays afloat. I don't think it's fear; it's greed.
- ExoticPearTree 6mo ago> They invested billions. They're scared. They could have shipped a good product with all those billions they spent in reinventing Clippy. I have this feeling that their bet was that all the Microsoft shops will jump on Copilot without looking at alternatives, so they did not really have to make it as good as their competition.
- bigyabai 6mo ago> They could have shipped a good product with all those billions They did. It's called Azure: https://www.geekwire.com/2026/microsoft-tops-wall-street-expectations-reports-accelerating-azure-growth-and-37b-ai-run-rate/ https://www.geekwire.com/2026/microsoft-tops-wall-street-exp...
- rsynnott 6mo agoThat's largely a product of work in the 2010s. What's their next Azure? Clippy on steroids probably won't cut it.
- bigyabai 6mo agoTheir next Azure is the same as the next App Store and the next YouTube; they are services, you just keep operating them while they're in the green. Microsoft's B2C reputation is undeniably burnt, but their B2B mindshare is unshakable.
- justinclift 6mo ago
- buzzerbetrayed 6mo ago> There was a time that Google cared deeply about UX Have we been using the same Google?
- frizlab 6mo agoSome people seem to think they cared, at some point. I’m not one of them.
- ninjalanternshk 6mo agoIf you had been a Yahoo user when Google launched, you’d understand.
- HeavyStorm 6mo agoWe have. That's why the parent said _there was a time_, implying that this is no longer true.
- dwedge 6mo agoTheir search homepage was supposed to be minimal. I was at a tech talk given by Google sometime around 2012 and they said that their ad service is not under any circumstances allowed to slow down the page load - if the ads don't return before the page is ready the pager is rendered without ads. Chrome had so many great ux choices originally, such as tabs all staying the same size when you were closing them so that you could close multiple easily and only resizing after a second or two (that stopped working around a year ago). Hell there are even rumours that Chrome is called Chrome because it was a polished UX. Their original products were so smooth compared to what was there before. Search compared to altavista, mail compared to Hotmail, both compared to Yahoo!. I really don't know where your perspective comes from. GCP?
- phatfish 6mo agoIf i remember chrome:// used to have special meaning in Firefox (and probably well before that), and was used to tweak UI settings. I always assumed this was where Google took the name from.
- gib444 6mo ago> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation Which literal 20+ year period was that?
- storus 6mo agoIt's a complete takeover of technically incompetent management that feels like it can finally execute their ideas to the fullest instead of relying on those pesky swengs with their obstructions, complaints and problems. We'll soon get the management utopia everywhere.
- mohamedkoubaa 6mo agoPrincipal engineer balks at bad UX when the PM should know better (it's their job) 2023: Ah well I guess we can't do it 2025: you're fired. Hey kid we hired two weeks ago, implement bad idea please
- palata 6mo agoTo be fair, it was already done by bad managers long before.
- hirako2000 6mo agoI saw a trend of UX/UI designers coming with practice which I knew better were wrong. But they insisted. E.g hijack brosser native controls. Will never know whether they passed along some manager/PM commandements or were just incompetent.
- themanualstates 6mo agoTo be fair, the native browser controls have had too many quirks and features fox UX/UI consistency. Corporate needs their Brand™ look precisely as specified in their expensive Style Guide. IBM wouldn't want the Google vibes of Android Material Design TextFields, I imagine. Scratch beneath the visuals, and starker technical differences appear. Safari on iOS (used to?) has a 350ms debounce delay on every tap / click, in case you want to do a multitouch gesture. JavaScript (Frameworks) were the only way this arbitrary delay to user input could be reduced before 2015, when Apple finally released a native API for this. https://webkit.org/blog/5610/more-responsive-tapping-on-ios/ https://webkit.org/blog/5610/more-responsive-tapping-on-ios/
- ExoticPearTree 6mo ago> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation. And then set fire to the whole thing in an offering to their robot gods. Probably they thought the new generations forgot about how awful they were in the not so distant past. I think they set it all on fire because greed got the better of them again.
- cyanydeez 6mo agoAI psychosis. Divide between rich and poor. They live in their own golden bubbles and there's no sanity checks. The workers are so far removed from the realm of competentance and influence it's just CEOs and VPs trying to pump the next 6 months stock value regardless of anything. It's like the zeitgeist has decided the only thing that matters is their own farts and how they dont smell.
- makeitdouble 6mo ago> greed Is a greed/not greed scale really useful to discuss company behaviors ? I wanted to say I get what you mean, but even thinking about the company I root for the most, I can't think of a point where they're not driven by their desire to make a lot more money. If your point is that there's good and bad ways to seek money, I'm not sure it's properly encompassed by "greed", which I interpret as the intensity of a desire, not its nature or validity. To you "greed" might mean something else, but is it properly conveyed ?
- estimator7292 6mo agoApproximately everybody would like more money. Greedy people put the desire for more money above the welfare of the business, themselves, and other. Greedy people literally put their desire for more personal wealth above the very lives of others. Greed/not greed is a very fair way of putting it. One can operate a business that requires profit without wanting to destroy everyone and everything that stands in the way of more money.
- pdpi 6mo agoI think there's one more factor that is crucially important — greedy people lack long-term vision, and care a lot more about money now than they do about potentially much more money in the future. I suppose it's kind of interesting that you could measure greed as an unusually high discount rate for the time value of money?
- giancarlostoro 6mo agoIts even worse in my eyes, they dont even offer a model they themselves maintain.
- fuzzy_biscuit 6mo agoNot that surprising when you consider the monumental investments. It's heinous but right in line with modern corporate business ethics.
- diego_sandoval 6mo ago> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation. Mmm... I think I missed that part.
- smaudet 6mo agoNot everyone bought it, but they campaigned hard...and now see it was all just a dog and pony show. The hold-outs were right...
- bigstrat2003 6mo agoNot really. A company is not one monolithic entity with a single will. Far more plausible than "it was all a trick" is that for a time, people were in charge who really were trying to improve things, and now, those people have been replaced with others who are willing to burn it all down.
- bitwize 6mo agoHackernews used to experience a collective paroxysm of joy every time a new Visual Studio Code dropped. There definitely was a pervasive belief that the Nadella era ushered in a cuddly new Microsoft.
- danlugo92 6mo agoI remember a time, way back, around 2010 maybe?, where Microsoft was referred to as "M$" in this place and generally perceived as an evil corporation o.O
- AlexandrB 6mo ago> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation. "Decades" is a stretch. There was a brief window around the Windows 7/8 era and then, like a dog returning to his vomit, they returned to their user-hostile bullshit. Windows 11 is the culmination of that, but Windows 10 was plenty bad. Remember how Windows 10 made Solitaire a subscription service? Sticking copilot into everything is just more of the same.
- pocksuppet 6mo agoHas always been the case. Corporations hate standards and would rather lock you in except where market forces prevent them. It was a miracle we have something like the internet - and the government had to create it. Microsoft's decade-long PR rehabilitation has worked wonders for them.
- dspillett 6mo agoExcept the standards other & regulations that increase the barrier for market entry. They love those standards once they feel sufficiently entrenched.
- avd201 6mo agoThe thing the annoys me the most (to use polite language) is that product design went off the window with the AI craze. You could probably ship actual products that actual people would want to use, but instead everyone wants to turn everything into a chatbot, as if chatbots are the pinnacle of user interface, the crabs of software, the purpose, goal, and telos of technology. It drives me nuts.
- andrekandre 6mo ago> turn everything into a chatbot, as if chatbots are the pinnacle of user interface i have seen this first-hand, so many chat bots added to so many screens... like how about just make the ux better? well, that wouldn't look good at individual/team review time cause its not "using ai", so its not a suprise that's what we are getting.
- quectophoton 6mo agoA text input field for entering your command line(s), with a text log for the output, does indeed seem to be the crabs of software. Usually with some abstractions that allow you to write longer scripts[1] and just refer to them by a short name or alias, and compose those scripts together from your command prompt. You could say it's the terminal[2] user interface. [1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/script https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/script [2]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/terminal https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/terminal
- sham1 6mo agoWhile this is very pithy, we need to acknowledge and remember that there's a gulf of difference between normal terminal interfaces and command line interfaces, and whatever the chatbots are doing. Yes, both have a prompt where you type text to do things and get text back, but the type of text you write in one is very different than what you'd write in another. Prose versus commands and so on. Oh, and normal terminals don't waste electricity and water in amounts approaching small countries.
- cjonas 6mo agoClaude code not supporting specifying an alternate location to look for agent skills is another example.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- nelox 6mo agoSent from iPhone
- registeredcorn 6mo agoWhat did Command+G do in OSX? Online results are saying it "advances to the next search result after doing find". In other OS', that's just the enter key, if I am understanding the context correctly.
- rsynnott 6mo agoIn MacOS it advances to the next search result _even if the search widget is not currently open_.
- registeredcorn 6mo agoInteresting! Thanks.
- jorvi 6mo ago> And it's not just them. There was a time that Google cared deeply about UX Are we talking about the same Google? They still haven't fixed Android gesture navigation after almost a decade.
- left-struck 6mo agoWait, when did they rehabilitate their reputation? Before AI they were already shoving crap down our throats through windows 11.
- tardedmeme 6mo agoMicrosoft was making a big PR push to show everyone how they loved open source for a while.
- zahlman 6mo agoThe entire selling point is "you no longer have to conform to standards in input to get usable output"; why would they conform to standards in output, or in process?
- Ferret7446 6mo agoWhat do you mean, there are many, perhaps too many, AI standards. MCP, SKILLS.md, A2A, two different ACPs, ECA.
- slashdave 6mo agoThis particular change feels... human driven.
- rcbdev 6mo agoGMAIL in the web is so shitty, I literally switched over to another provider. I don't know how anyone can use them as their webmail client. You can't make sense of longer mail threads with forwards, answers etc. in between - it becomes an unreadable hot mess.
- jaskerr 6mo agoWould you tell us which provider/client you switched to?
- pjmlp 6mo agoYeah, even .NET is now plagued with AI, see AI dashboard on Aspire, AI components on Blazor, .NET upgrade assistant now being AI agent,.... VSCode hasn't yet been rebranded into VS CoPilot by pure luck.
- shaky-carrousel 6mo agoThe industry spent decades preaching us about power savings, with Microsoft settings application lecturing about power saves and the update app programming them on renewables peak, only for... wasting gigawatts by forcing us to have copilot everywhere. If Microsoft were consistent, which isn't, power saving mode would disable AI features.
- carschno 6mo agoIn literally must have missed that. When did Microsoft ever encourage energy saving? Is this related to power saving for extending laptop battery runtime? But then I don't get the link to renewable energy. Anyway, I agree with the notion of the extreme energy-inefficiency of LLMs. The scale of it makes it hard to imagine any less efficient product will ever be invented.
- shaky-carrousel 6mo agoThey literally have a green leaf next to power saving options. Also, there's an option in windows upgrades to time the upgrades to when the grid is mostly renewables.
- smcin 6mo agoApparently since Windows 11, Sun Valley 2 update ("22H2"?) back around 3/2022. https://www.pcgamer.com/windows-11-update-will-help-your-pc-prioritise-renewable-energy/ https://www.pcgamer.com/windows-11-update-will-help-your-pc-... https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2024/04/22/reducing-the-environmental-impact-of-windows-devices/ https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2024/04/22/reduc...
- i_think_so 6mo agoCould this be hacked to schedule upgrades to only happen when the user is not about to join a meeting in 5 minutes? "Yeah, uh, my local electric provider is burning coal 24/7 except at 9-10 pm on these 5 dates each year...."
- 6mo ago
- zombot 6mo ago> all that matters is "pls use our AI". If you look at the staggering amounts of money that have been put into the tech, this attitude becomes practically mandatory, in an inhuman sense. They have to get ROI, at literally any cost. And it shows.
- biztos 6mo ago> There was a time that Google cared deeply about UX. I’m sure Google cares very much about UX as a funnel into their ad brokerage, but was there some time when they cared about it in the user’s interest? Maybe that magical moment when the results page showed the results first?
- redeeman 6mo ago> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation. TRYING to rehabilitate. only fools fell for it
- PunchyHamster 6mo agoThe pile of money they set on fire is still burning and they are desperate to get returns before it burns out
- GaryBluto 6mo ago> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation. And then set fire to the whole thing in an offering to their robot gods. When did this happen?
- wallst07 6mo agoWhen they started embracing and using Linux, WSL is pretty good. But it doesn't completely wash out it's past.
- camdenreslink 6mo agoDotnet core was also a move in that direction with large portions being open source.
- wiseowise 6mo agoThat wasn't rehabilitation, they just wanted to save the dying platform.
- jazzypants 6mo agoI don't think anyone at Microsoft truly understands how much they have ruined their reputation. This won't be fixed again by open-sourcing a few tools. Fool me once, etc. I will fight against any Microsoft tooling being used at every company until I die. This is unforgivable.
- giovannibonetti 6mo ago>There was a time that Google cared deeply about UX. Now, on macOS Google remaps CMD-G in Google Docs to launch some LLM bullshit That reminds me of a few years ago when Android phones replaced the behavior of "long press sleep/power button" from "shut down" to "ask AI about what's in your screen". Perhaps a manager got promoted somewhere for "raising AI usage" in Android phones.
- inquirerGeneral 6mo ago[dead]
- martin-t 6mo ago> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation I hated with a passion when people claimed "MS loves open source now". I feel vindicated. If a corporation can do a 180° turn in one direction, it can do a 180° turn in the other direction just as fast. They did not understand that, either because they didn't want to or because they weren't smart enough to understand how incentives shape behavior. The incentives or a corporation are roughly making money for "shareholders"[0], making money for the C suite, making money for managers. [0]: = People who do none of the actual work but have enough money to use it to get more money which therefore goes to them instead of the people doing actual work. (Intentionally saying "get" instead of "make" because they don't "make" anything.)
- altairprime 6mo agoWhat use is a reputation if you don’t spend it now and then? If this lets Microsoft cut some divisional headcounts by 95%, certainly their enterprise customers are onboard with naked greed and don’t care about how it looks either — and us individuals aren’t relevant to MS, so why would maintaining our good perception of them matter at all?