I always turn off swap and that solves this problem. I really don't understand why it is on by default anymore. If you need swap, you are doing something very wrong somewhere else.
I wish you were right, but Microsoft has a lot of money they can throw at the problem. Right now they don't care about Windows because their money comes from Azure. There are a few concerns here: if people _really_ moved away from Windows that would actually threaten the Azure ecosystem. Further, since Microsoft doesn't care to make a profit (with Windows) they could also just throw resources at Windows because it supports their Azure business. Microsoft can hire talent if they need to and turn the ship around.
It's possible that due to Azure success they decided that consumer sector is a testing ground for their exploitation patterns, where they can test out how much their userbase can withstand before being seriously annoyed. And this is what happen, people said "enough" by looking for alternatives.
They can throw money to tweak some stuff but I doubt they'll fully back off from pushing for software+services or all this recent conditioning for Copilot. This piece is a damage control but wording shows they won't change. I doubt that in last 26 years we had a company that truly admitted its mistakes - that's not in the "nature" of such entities.
I think companies think that once they go past the threshold they will know almost immediately and then returning is a simple matter of returning to the threshold. But it doesn't work like that its more like how tires loose grip at the limit, once they start to slide they loose an enormous amount of grip and you need to roll back your use a lot before they regrip up. In tires its 30%, but the amniosity with customers that all the anti user things they have done its a never ending list of complaints and the last 10% nor 30% is going to cut it to stop the exodus. Once people have left its very unlikely they come back if Linux is still working well for them. People change operating systems like they change banks.
My routine is that I curse at the voice bot and treat it really poorly and berate it, but then I'm really calm, polite, and professional with the real person I end up talking to. In the vast majority of cases, yelling a person is both rude in a strict moral sense, but also usually counterproductive even when viewed through a totally selfish lens.
This feels like the real-life equivalent of that old Family Guy joke where Peter is with a squad of dudes in Vietnam but is dressed like a clown. He says something to the effect of "You guys are stupid. They're going to be looking for army guys." Outside of the absurdity of the situation, the joke is that the guy dressed as a clown obviously stands out even more.
Juggalo makeup might block some facial recognition tech, but you also paint a huge target on yourself.
I genuinely believe there's an xkcd for everything. I was only reading about the creator, Randall Munroe a few days ago and he's clearly very talented.
"I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data."
Not really the point of the article, but almost all major news sites are significantly better if you block javascript. You sometimes lose pictures and just get text, but often the pictures are irrelevant anyhow. (a story about a world leader, and some public / stock photo is used and is not truly relevant to the story)
News sites are almost like lyric sites or recipe sites in this regard. The seem to presume that many visitors will not be regular visitors, and so they try to maximize value from every single visit.
This is broadcast publishing in a nutshell. Look at the early radio shows, they had names like "Alka-Seltzer Time," "The Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour," "The General Motors Hour" and so on. It was explicitly "we are playing music to get you to tune into our advertisement."
Free newspapers and alt-weeklies are the same. How are they supposed to function if people don't pay for them?
People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them, but they want someone to make the lyrics available for them, for free, on the Internet, forever. And they feel they are entitled to this without ads for some reason. That's where we are today.
Somewhere along the way, we lost the original vibe of the Internet. There was a time when it was fundamentally a community. People hosted things for the sheer joy of doing it and for the satisfaction of contributing.
If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point.
I would actually flip your statement around. Today, many people feel entitled to be paid for sharing things on the Internet. In that sense, they are the newcomers. The original ethos was about sharing information simply because it mattered to someone else, and a few of us still believe that value has not gone away.
Geocities ran ads, but the user's page was still in the spirit of OPs comment. I'd say that lasted until the late 00's. Around 2009. I partially blame the rise of Facebook for the proliferation of "social," though, people tend to get bored with _anything_ if it stagnates too long. Regardless, the internet was inherently social before that; they only changed the landscape. Not for the better in my eyes (though hindsight's 20/20).
It was 96/97. I remember thinking "The drones are moving in on this."
Canter and Siegel had nuked Usenet in 1994, and banners were invented in 1994 by Hotwired. But it took a while for the tech to eat the web, because the web was a niche interest for the first few years.
During that time you could - and a lot of people did - put together a simple site with a text editor and free hosting supplied by your ISP.
The majority of internet users wouldn't have experienced that supposed world.
The median age in the US in 39, which means at least half of all Americans would have been in elementary school or not around during that supposed era of the internet, and the mass adoption of the internet only really began in earnest in the early 2000s.
> "that supposed world ... that supposed era of the internet"
"Supposed: Presumed to be true or real without conclusive evidence". You think there isn't conclusive evidence that the internet existed before 1995? o_O
There are distinctions to be made between rotating/static display ads, spam and everything (i.e., user surveillance) that encompasses digital advertising today. Personally, ads don't bother me. Spam is annoying in terms of UX. But really, user surveillance is what we need to worry about in terms of UX, our privacy, security, etc.
I think there's a worse-step beyond passive surveillance, where ad-networks function as a channel for viruses that seek to change your computer, along with scams and phishing.
Ad-blocking--refusing to run their code--is a simply common sense when the networks are not liable for ensuring that the code they send is not malicious.
>If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point.
Unfortunately, music lyrics are protected by copyrights so your site of King Crimson lyrics would not be authorized unless you paid for a license. The music publisher may not expend the effort to have a lawyer send you a "Cease & Desist" letter to make you take it down because your personal website is small fish but they wouldn't ignore a popular website that tried to show all lyrics for free with no ads.
The legitimate ongoing licensing costs from Gracenote/Lyricfind for their catalogs of millions of song lyrics will cost significantly more than the hosting bill. The cost is beyond the resources of typical hobbyists who like to share information for free.
EDIT: I have no idea what the downvotes are about. If you think my information about lyrics licensing is incorrect, explain why. Several decades ago, volunteers were sharing guitar tabs for free on the internet and that also got shut down by the music publishers because of copyright violations. Previous comment about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24598821
> The music publisher may not expend the effort to have a lawyer send you a "Cease & Desist" letter to make you take it down because your personal website is small fish but they wouldn't ignore a popular website that tried to show all lyrics for free with no ads.
Exactly. Now what if there wasn't one popular website with all the lyrics, but a million different small fanpages?
There's a tension that the fan engagement is what really makes entertainers rich. The industry has every right to crack down, but if they do say they are really cutting their own legs off.
I think if there's any negative phrasing in your first three words, those reading from the Philosophers Chair (bathroom) are primed to take what immediately follows as Bad Vibes and downvote accordingly. They're not in this for accuracy.
Well my problem isn't with the writing in its original form, it's with the downvoting in response to it. I am fine with someone bringing bad news if it's helpful info.
The signal (fan sites) to noise (sites focusing on revenue) ratio is way off today. The issues are that ad revenue generating sites are too plentiful, in some cases they are generated by code and they are more highly placed in search engine results. SEO and procedurally created content is where we lost the way (I think the lure of getting rich as a social media influencer or streamer further moved us away).
I was looking for discussion around a brand new album last night (not King Crimson related...), like from an internet forum, reddit, even a review, but the first few pages of search results were all storefronts selling/streaming it, PR (not even reviews) or AI generated pages about the artist. The stuff I was looking for existed, but I only found it after adding "reddit" to the search terms. I was hoping to find a new forum similar to this one focused on that kind of music. Reddit is not ad free, but at least it has a raison d'etre beyond advertising...
So, it's harder to find fan sites, and I'm sure fan site maintainers are less motivated to keep up for this reason (a more popular site is probably more fun to maintain). At least compare this to FOSS projects. I think findability is easier for those, and the popular ones are reasonably well maintained.
Yes, and yet we would do well to distinguish hobbies from necessities, like quality journalism. Not saying there's an easy fix, but there better be one.
> If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point.
Anyone can still do this today (I don’t know the legalities of publishing copyrighted lyrics though). Of course, the proportion of people who wanted to do that was much higher in previous decades.
But we also spend much more time and bandwidth today than decades ago, so maybe it just wasn’t feasible to expect that much quality content from volunteers to keep flowing.
But in search results, you only find the sites that game the system to maximize their profits, while millions of other well-meaning sites get little to no traffic, and eventually people lose interest in maintaining an online presence. They move toward big silos like Instagram, platforms that just use their content to attract more ads.
Ads do break the internet, or let's say, fundamentally change the model of how it works to the detriment of most people
But no-one would ever find it - which might be fine - and that seems like a waste.
>> to expect that much quality content from volunteers to keep flowing.
This is a big change in perspective & expectation. The original web was not volunteers doing work for others, but humans voluntarily doing work to share with others.
Nobody could find it back in 1994 either! That was part of the fun. You stumbled on a webring or somebody's curated oracle and found a bunch of interesting weird tiny websites.
I was trying to use a grain/chaff analogy to respond to your post, but I think there were just less crops in the old days. For the sites (crops) that were there, you had a lot more healthy ones. As spam and low-quality sites proliferated, the signal->noise ratio of sites got completely out-of-balance.
In a proper world, searching for "band song lyrics" would take you ... to the band's website, where they'd have perhaps some ads for band-related things and the lyrics, right there.
Copyright and SEO and other stupidity prevents the obvious solution from being the enacted one.
You used to get the lyrics when you bought the music. Came in a nice booklet with the tape or CD, and then you would read along while listening to the music.
Should be the same with streaming. If I can listen to the song, I should be able tho see the lyrics.
There is a huge difference between providing a service with adverts to pay for it, and what almost all lyric sites are. They don't just put up ads and the related opportunities for adtech to stalk us in order to pay for the server and bandwidth: they spend time and money (SEO, sometimes more active advertising themselves) seeking out more and more visits to extract more revenue from that stalking and advertising relationship. And the have few standards on the sort of 3rd parties they deal with: last time I found myself on such a site and some things got through my blocking, the ads shown wouldn't have looked out of place on a porn site.
Selling ad impressions and stalking opportunities is the point of those sites, offering lyrics is just a way to do that.
That's how the internet worked back when we were all excited about it. Giving things away for free is easy on the web; irritating people badly enough that you can squeeze money out of them is what takes effort.
No, its because greedy people try to make money off people. Ads are the reason the internet sucks. There could be a wikipedia like site for lyrics that would cost pennies to maintain and people who like music and contributing would add to it. But scummy sites making money will pay to be at the top of search results as an ad, so they can get people to click on their site that is full of ads, all while sucking up bandwidth and processing power. Why are their dozens of almost identicle recipes for every dish? Because each one is trying to extract money with ads. Why do they all have some long-winded story about how they grew up eating this recipe every 9/11 anniversary? So they have more space to shove ads.
Wikipedia only exsists because they refuse to sell out. Do you know how much money they could make turning every wiki reader into a product for ads?
> Wikipedia only exsists because they refuse to sell out
Technically, they already did a long time ago. Jimmy Wales spun up a for-profit arm using the wikipedia tech stack, and it's now everyone's least favourite ad-ridden pop culture wiki[1]...
There's an asymmetry here. We aren't talking about ads like billboard ads or TV commercials. We're talking about creepy behavioral tracking, harvesting and selling.
I go to YouTube and see a lot of things that make me question the narrative that this is an advanced system that elicits user preferences, makes markets clear, allows competitors to enter the market, etc.
The first ad I see if is for Chrome. Well I'm already using Chrome because sometimes Youtube punishes me for using Firefox. So the message is "lights are on and nobody is home", I mean, they can see the user agent and probably have deeper analysis that would indicate I'm not faking it.
Next I get a sequence of three obvious scam ads. Trying to provoke the fear of dementia in elderly people unless you use this "one weird trick" or a crypto scam or something that's obviously a scam but no way I am going to sit through 45 minutes of droning to know what the punch line is.
Then there are the saturation ads for things like car insurance that are always over-advertised because nobody wants to buy them (people wouldn't buy insurance at all if they didn't get it from their employer, or had to get it to drive a car or get a mortgage, etc.) These have internalized the form of the scam ads because they're surrounded by them.
Finally after maybe 20 ads I see something I might want and think "do I send them an email that says I'm afraid they're a scam because they're advertising in a place soaked with scams, they've incorporated so many superficial characteristics of scams and that they should reconsider their advertising spend?"
I know the numbers say Google and Facebook are making money hand over fist but on the ground my perception is that it looks like a Potemkin Village that is trying to fool investors into thinking there is a vibrant "advertising economy" when it is really a vast wasteland like daytime TV where it is all about medicare fraud and personal injury lawyers.
> I know the numbers say Google and Facebook are making money hand over fist but on the ground my perception is that it looks like a Potemkin Village that is trying to fool investors into thinking there is a vibrant "advertising economy" when it is really a vast wasteland like daytime TV where it is all about medicare fraud and personal injury lawyers.
by hook or crook, people have things to sell and those platforms are the place to put up shop... (my opinion) most new products/services are garbage (hello temu and friends) so its not a surprise most ads are therefore garbage/frauds as well...
I'll admit that objects you buy from Temu are often 2-3x larger or (more likely) smaller than than you expect them to be, but often they are OK. Having worked a bit in recommendation engineering I have a lot of respect for what they do.
I've built a number of nice puzzle kits with Chinese themes I bought from Temu but don't actually use any of my kemonomimi supplies I bought from Temu and instead rely on American fashion brands, Etsy or commissions.
> People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them
You're wrong. We pay for everything all the time.
We pay for home internet (not cheap!). We pay for various subscriptions and streaming services. We pay for online tools. We pay for a TON of stuff.
And we still get hit by tons of obnoxious, invasive ads regardless of how much we pay. And people call us pirates if we want to install and adblocker. Advertisers like to violate us; it's their business model.
Stop parroting their lines, and stop defending bullshit.
I think your point about one-off visitors is key. If most traffic is coming from search/social, there's no real incentive to build a clean, loyal-reader experience
Brave + shields
With nasty popups + block scripts will sometimes work without breaking the site.
Chrome forces you to see ads and all the rest of it, Firefox is tolerable but I struggled a bit with enough settings and plugins, it's not as seamless.
It depends. Some sites have a soft, client-side paywall and others have a hard, server-side paywall. NYT has the latter, so you can't get the full article text with JS blocked.
I'd say that very much ties into the point of the article. The fact that turning off a major component of your browser significantly improves the experience is damning. That means they put tremendous effort (i.e. money) into deliberately making their readers' experience worse.
Generally speaking people have worse impulse control than they believe they do. Once you give a tool that does most of the work for you, very very few people will actually be able to use that tool in truly enriching ways. The majority of people (even the smart ones) will weaken over time and take shortcuts.
I have a very simple solution to this but it is a bit expensive. I run two laptops, one that I talk to an LLM on and another where I do all my work and which is my main machine. The LLM is strictly there in a consulting role, I've done some coding experiments as well (see previous comments) but nothing that stood out to me as a major improvement.
The trick is: I can't cut-and-paste between the two machines. So there is never even a temptation to do so and I can guarantee that my writing or other professional output will never be polluted. Because like you I'm well aware of that poor impulse control factor and I figured the only way to really solve this is to make sure it can not happen.
This is a nice solution, but I think it speaks to just how enticing the problem is. This is the sort of tactic someone with a gambling addiction would employ. I don't say that to be rude to you: I've had to do similar things with regard to addicting infinite-scroll internet sites, and I definitely give in more than I'd like.
I am totally aware of my weakness in light of potential addiction, that's why I don't give it any chance, so you are spot on and it is not taken as rude at all.
In a similar vein, I want a text editor where pasting from an external source isn't allowed. If you try, it should instantly remove the pasted text. Copy-pasting from inside the document would still be allowed (it could detect this by keeping track of every string in the document that has been selected by the cursor and allowing pastes that match one of those strings).
It wouldn't work in every use case (what if you need to include a verbatim quote and don't want to make typos by manually typing it?), but it'd be useful when everything in the document should be your words and you want to remove the temptation to use LLMs.
I think that's the only way to deal with such temptations. Kidding yourself that you are strong enough to do it 'just once' or that you can handle the temptation is foolish and will only lead to predictable outcomes. I have a similar policy to smoking, drugs, alcohol and so on, I just don't want the temptation. It helps to have seen lots of people who thought they were smart enough eventually go under (but the price is pretty high).
Oh, and LLMs are of course geared to pull you in further, they are on a continuous upsell salespitch. Drug pushers could learn a thing or two from them.
That's an excellent point. It seems likely they thought they could operate as a proper reviewer, but when the deadline came, they took the shortcut they knew they were not supposed to take.
It really does sound like an addiction when you put it this way.
I think you're framing this behaviour too generously. Laziness is one thing, lack of integrity is another, and this seems to be a straightforward case of cheating and lying.
I think it's just numbers. When one person errs it's a fault of character. When most people err, we call it a systematic fault. Why are most people overweight for the first time in history? Do most people lack the good character to restrict their diet? You could argue yes, however appeals to character won't actually solve the problem.
I agree in principle, but we interact with hundreds of companies per day. Which ones are honest and which ones are taking advantage of us? I really don't have the cycles to run it all down, and keep up with it over time. Perhaps Firefox VPN will be totally private initially and then violate privacy 2 years in? Would I ever know? Maybe? I need to err on the side of caution for a lot of these decisions because so many companies are bad actors. I'm sure I don't always err correctly, but I don't have better options.
Firefox already had a rebadged Mullvad VPN service. I thought about switching but I found it had way fewer payment options and the log policy did not look encouraging when I read it. Made it sound like not only did it keep some kind of connection logs but that they'd cough them up pretty easily. Maybe their policy has changed but it did not seem to be a compelling offering.
True but you chose to post in the comment section of a news story, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for more nuance than for something you see randomly in the wild.
And your point, HN would probably actually notify me if Mozilla became (more) evil. I'm just making a general point. Is my hardware store selling my information every time I enter it now that they have camera everywhere? I don't have a good way to audit it. Even if I did, I'd be failing to audit what some other evil company is doing.
A lot of polling is quite terrible, and the questions are designed to get the desired answers. It doesn't mean that polling itself is invalid, but it's often warped to be invalid by idealists.
The experts were correct. Azure is the biggest pile of shit I've ever had to work with. Everything feels evolutionary. In other words, a new product in azure is barely a product at all, but a small appendage which totally inherits a bunch of preexisting Azure "stuff." And all this preexisting stuff may not really make sense for the product, and it might inherit stuff that makes the product much worse. But, it doesn't matter. To even think about using the product, you need to learn way more about the larger Azure ecosystem than you ever bargained for, and of course deal with Microsoft products that do not really integrate well because the teams don't talk to each other. Log formats, conventions, everything will be different as you float around to different parts of Azure. Basic security concepts, such as a SIEM will be implemented in such strange ways that you wonder if Microsoft has any idea what a SIEM even is.
As a Microsoftie of more than a decade... Yeah, I see this.
We have an internal system called Cosmos[0] that does a great job of processing huge quantities of data very fast. And we sat on it for years while the rest of the industry moved to Spark and its derivatives. We finally released it as Azure Data Lake Analytics (ADLA) but did a shit job of supporting/promoting it.
We built Synapse, and it's garbage. We've now got Fabric which I guess is the new Synapse. I wouldn't really know because I probably have five different systems that I use that basically do large-scale data processing, and yet Fabric isn't one of them; who knows, maybe it will become the sixth?
We've had numerous internal systems for orchestrating jobs, and it wasn't until Azure Data Factory that we finally released something externally that we sort-of-kind-of-but-not-really use internally. (To be fair, some teams do use it internally, but we're not all rowing in the same direction.)
I regularly deal with multiple environments with different levels of isolation for security. I don't even know how it's all supposed to work -- I have my regular laptop and a secure workstation and three accounts that work on the two. Yet I have to do some privileged account escalation to activate these roles; when I'm done, there's no apparent way to end the activation early, so I just let it time out.
These things are but a fraction of the Azure offerings, but literally everything I have used in Azure makes me absolutely HATE working in the cloud. There's not a single bright side to it AFAICT. As best as I can tell, the only reason why Azure makes so much damn money is because Microsoft is huge and can leverage its size into growth. We're very much failing up here.
This is the story of Microsoft - five different ways to do the thing, none of which do everything, and all of which are in various states of disrepair ranging from outright deprecation on up through feature-incomplete preview. Which one do you use? Who knows, but by the time you get everything moved over to that one and make allowances for all the stuff the one you chose doesn't support, there will be a new more logical choice for "that one" and you'll have to start over again. Wheee.
We are now definitely doing a lot of that. My manager has been saying things like, "I don't even know how it works, but I used AI to build [thing], and I just sent it to a PR." He's very strong technically, but the mindset has absolutely shifted to, "move fast and break things, yoloooooo". It's frustrating to say the least.
I don't mean this as a jab, but would you use Windows to develop software? Especially Windows that has AD teeth sunk into it where everything is "managed by your organization." It's just a thousand small cuts for seemingly no good reason.
I'm a c++ developer and I wouldn't use anything other than Windows to develop software, for one reason alone - Visual Studio is a fantastic tool that is better than any IDE I have ever tried it and imho it's the best product Microsoft makes. It just works and works well. And most console toolchains are only on Windows, so outside of iOS development I don't really have a choice.
No, but I also wouldn't let people who do not understand the soul of the OS to rewrite it.
If I were the microslop god for 6 weeks, I would force everyone to go to a boot camp and use Windows 7 for 4 of those weeks so they could see what made it so good.
No invasiveness, an OS that felt like yours. Just enough eye candy to not be distracting but to also feel like a clean modern system. Low system usage at idle. Calm, clean, and ready to roll when you clicked a button.
Windows is NEVER going to be MacOS, but the dev teams seem obsessed with macifying windows while also wedging that AI abomination copilot into every line of code, so windows is getting a tag team of rapid enshittification on top of already having been massively enshittified, and at least some portion of it is due to the people being paid to make it not understanding what it is supposed to be, the niche it held, and the reason for windows existence.
Yes, because you know what all of the 200,000+ employees are doing in every wing and branch of the entire company.
Then again, Microsoft themselves directly dispute your statement:
Across the landscape of more than 750,000 devices in use at Microsoft, we support Windows, Android, iOS, and macOS devices. Windows devices account for approximately 60 percent of the total employee-device population, while iOS, Android, and macOS account for the rest. Of these devices, approximately 45 percent are personally owned employee devices, including phones and tablets. Our employees are empowered to access Microsoft data and tools using managed devices that enable them to be their most productive.
Not to mention that most app designers use OSX for the design tools, which means that there is going to be by default some bleed between the two systems on design choices alone.
> while iOS, Android, and macOS account for the rest. Of these devices, approximately 45 percent are
Pretty much everyone has an android or iOS device in their pocket. A lot of those devices are enrolled into Microsoft MDM in order to access email/teams/etc. These phones are part of the stats. Dev work in general is done on Windows boxes, unless you are in specific teams that have other requirements. Default is Windows, specifically Windows laptop.
Worst case somewhere around 50,000-150,000 tablets.
That leaves ~200,000 unaccounted for devices with only macOS on the table. I think the saturation is higher than you have experienced, although I'll give that it's entirely possible that the areas you worked in were not one of them.
Ugh this sounds like when I worked at Oracle/OCI. Some environments required a VPN, some a jumpbox, and some required logging into a virtual desktop, and then logging into a jumpbox. Just thinking about it gives me PTSD
All the corporate stuff is behind Okta, so that easy enough.
But all the dev/test systems are a mix of SSO, individual logins, etc. At least they're all behind the same VPN (except when they aren't, but that's less common).
And of course, if you're a cloud engineer (vs "normal" software engineer), you also have to deal with AWS access, which is a whole different can of worms.
And yet, somehow AWS managed to get this right-ish. They evolved, learned by making mistakes, and created de-facto standards (like object storage protocol) on the way, while at the same time supporting decades-old services. And I'm sure they'll withstand the current AI craze.
Their support team likes to sit on things for a while too.
I'm on day 4 of waiting for Azure to approve my support request to increase Azure Batch vCPUs from default of 4 to 20 for ESv3 series. I signed up last week and converted to a paid account. I'm going to use Google Cloud Batch today instead.
You’ve made a fundamental mistake and you’ll have the same result from every cloud provider.
You’re using a legacy v3 series that is being removed from the data centres in an era where you could be using v6 or newer instances that are being freshly deployed and are readily available.
If you can’t be bothered to keep an eye on these absolute basics, you’re going to have a rough time with any public cloud, no matter their logo design.
Right now you're paying more for less compute and having to deal with low availability too! Go read the docs and catch up to the last decade of virtual hardware changes.
Or, just run this and pick a size:
Get-AzBatchSupportedVMSku -Location 'centralus' | `
? Name -like 'Standard_E*v[67]'
So the internal Cosmos DB has nothing to do with Cosmos DB the Azure product, which was an unwieldy assemblage of a graph DB, a NoSQL DB, a time series DB and an RDBMS last time I looked at it, but seems to have morphed into a "vector DB for AI" according to today's marketing?
Absolute contempt for their users at every level. It’s so transparent. This is the end game of anticompetitive practices for decades— they just don’t have to try anymore… for now. Some day they’ll either have to compete in good faith or sink. I doubt that will happen soon, but someday.
I agree that VSC is solid for web dev or other script language workflows, and VS is fine, if a bit heavy-handed. That said, Windows native development is a freaking mess. Try figuring out what their recommended native UI kit is these days. Everything is half-assed and half-supported at best. Unless it’s going to either feed them a ton of marketing telemetry or let them bump up their supposed copilot adoption statistics, you’re yesterday’s news to MS.
It's hard to argue against contempt but... I'm gonna try. It feels like at the end of the line it's just a checkbox someone gets without having to consider the consequences of the changes. Either it's too big or there's too many levels where decisions get made and handed down to drones (or AI), but the people who decide seem to have no concept of what their products are used for and the people who implement features seem to have accepted that the system is so big that they can't understand all the impacts of their changes and have to rely on trusting commands from above - who may expect them to challenge from the POV of users or question things but never do. Anyway, this feels like what happens when managerial overhead and marketing KPIs smash into a complex product ecosystem. It all smells of IBM to be honest
Microsoft was always afraid of being IBM. They are more IBM than IBM.
When they started flying people in the beg that I buy 100 Surface Laptops, that was the confirmation of everything I had been thinking. All I could think of was IBM flying a dude from Italy in to talk for 15 minutes about their version of TeamViewer back in the day. We ended up talking about shoes.
Which is sad because the CEO's job is not to focus on the individual body parts but to make sure that the whole system is strong, beautiful, and healthy.
They can afford people who would do better. Windows 11 is trash. Azure is trash. Onedrive is trash. Outlook is trashier than it has ever been before, but it's not quite trash yet. Word is trash. Excel is rapidly enshittifying. Copilot is hot flaming radioactive tar cancer.
Does microslop even have a single thing left that isn't either completely terrible or worse than it used to be a mere 5 years ago?
Both. "New" outlook doesn't work with all of the add-ons and plug ins that "classic" outlook did. Both new and classic have copilot wedged into them. Classic has unasked for and unwanted Linkedin integrations that have to be turned off on a per-user basis, and it is patently clear that microslop has every intention of abandoning classic outlook the instant they believe that they can do so without severely alienating their userbase.
I don’t perceive benign neglect when they disregard UX for a product they’ve positioned so people essentially have to pay for and use it, while force-feeding them features they actively and vocally hate. Treating your customers as cash cows is fundamentally contemptful.
That's total "normal" for Microsoft at least from 2018, the year I started working with some of their products (Power BI mostly). They adopted a development model that is early release, fast iteration, and users as testers. No wonder everything feels experimental until much later.
Back then I just couldn't use Power BI. But fast forward a few years, I think it got a lot better since maybe 2020. You just have to stick with it for a few years.
I worked at a hospital in that timeframe and they rolled out Teams. Up until they, shadow IT teams were running Slack just fine.
Man, what a horrendous pile of crap Teams was back then. The Slack teams were griping that they should just buy Slack, but Teams was the "enterprise solution." The problems were amplified during remote COVID work. Teams is fine now, but how many corporations went through years of frustration just because some IT decision maker said "Teams. Because it's enterprise."
Yeah that's the thing. Management who made the deals are never put into that frustration, or very rarely, and I always wonder, at least for the big corporations, if there is any greasy palms...
Teams is still a horrendous pile of crap. It's just that you've gotten used to the stench. It has few redeeming qualities other than, "we don't have to pay for another subscription" and that's not even the case in the EU.
Yeah but today you can at least have a video call more or less normally. Back then it was a hiccup after a hiccup, it was impossible to work normally, and yet orgs pushed it down everybody's throats as it was bundled.
Definitely. Besides the performance issues, back then, Teams barely had any features. One example was that it wouldn't show you who was talking. First time we had a call was with 30 people and I remember a manager calling out a director responsible for this decision jokingly saying, "and you don't know who I am because Team doesn't show you who's talking."
The UI is an overengineered mess and I'd rather use literally anything else, but to say it's still unusable is disingenuous.
Most of the time it's just part of the bundle. If you are heavy into SQL Server, Office 365 and Power BI then there is a BIG chance you are going to use Azure for whatever the reason.
People who take Azure up without previous MS product experience...not sure about those.
There's a few, mostly retailers who don't want to give money to Amazon as a direct competitor, for them Microsoft/Azure is more of a neutral party, and most businesses already use Microsoft in at least some fashion so already have staff internally familiar with MS products (as opposed to say, going to GCP instead).
For everyone else, it's like you said. "Eh, we are already knee deep in the Microsoft stack, why would we pick anything else?"
a LOT of stuff comes for free or marginal (10-100$ a month) so yes, you do pay but it's already 'baked into' the contracts people generally carry with microsoft, or something for IT to worry about when the yearly renewals show up
Azure is the color of the face you have after Microsoft beats you with your own wallet. They don’t want to give you access to anything, they want to own it and make you pay for it.
I’ve seen this in other “follow the leader” businesses too, they are not looking to even have working features, just parity on a spreadsheet with the market leader… I’m looking at you Gitlab.
I sometimes wonder if I would feel the same about AWS if I hadn’t already invested a significant amount of time learning the entire ecosystem, nomenclatures, patterns/best practices, etc.
As someone who has worked with all three in many capacities, as is the worst by a mile. Don’t get me wrong. They are all very bad, but Azure is the king of shit.
And the same applies to regions. Try running is most of the regions, each is a bit different. And its not historical / sequential differences, just random.
How is this different than Amazon? Same problem there. Oh, you're using this new service? Need to view the logs? Want a nice friendly UI to do that? Fuck you here's Cloudwatch. Good luck.
Just to be clear, I'm responding to the parent comment not the article.
That's great but that's not really the problem. The real problem is Amazon likes to release services that depend on other services, but leave the integration work to us.
I'm convinced Amazon has many teams crapping out new features but they don't have the political clout (or manpower) to create a comprehensive product. They are mandated by management to use existing services, and thus we the users suffer because we have to manage all this extra crap and noise just to enable basic functionality.
It's maddening. And then also it's maddening to see another service from a different team that was able to throw off these shackles and actually make a product that is self contained. You get a taste of how good things could be, and then you're thrown right back into the IAM/SQS/Cloudwatch/Cloudformation/Policy/everything else under the sun soup.
See my other comment. Logs are just one small symptom of a larger problem of poorly integrated very complex services where the complexity is pushed onto the users and not properly managed by Amazon. Which sounds very much like the problems with Azure.
Right up until you try to access any settings menus.
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