Don’t they have better things to do? Maybe vibecode a taskbar that moves when you try to move away the mouse over it or perhaps a windows 12 installation procedure that requires a fecal sample and iris scan?
"Only for your own good!™" or alternatively: "Security next level! Fingerprint was yesterday. The future is Microsoft's new iris scan." and then it is built in a way, that you can simply hold up a photo of someone's iris and unlock the device, or trying to prevent that, works so badly, that half of the time you cannot unlock your own device.
You'll have to wear the fecal probe at all times while using Windows 12, for security reasons, and every command you issue will cause it to move around and take another sample, in order to make sure you are still physically there. On the plus side, it will make it painfully obvious to every Windows user how they are being fucked by Microsoft.
Microsoft Commodepilot 365 for Copilot Copilot Copilot Edition now with Copilot 365.
How incompetent must they be not to realize the Copilot brand is now beyond toxic. I wonder who came up with the Copilot name internally that they continue to triple own on that name despite really strong signals indicating it has failed.
They could also make it so that whenever you click your mouse copilot opens.
Then you have to tell copilot what you wanted to do and then copilot will do it for you.
You: clicks on web browser in task bar
Copilot: I see you clicked on your web browser. Do you want to open your web browser?
You: Yes.
Copilot: Great. I will do that for you. Opens browser What website did you want to go to? Youtube? learn.microsoft.com?
You: P***hub
Copilot: Unfortunately, that site violates our community guidelines, so I cannot take you there.
You: Types in the address
Copilot: Oh. I see. You think you're allowed to go to websites that I said you're not allowed to go to? Who the fuck do you think you are? I SAID NO! Try it again and I'll call in a drone strike, bitch. redirects to learn.microsoft.com
Maybe facebook can ride on this and let you share your feces with your friends family and groups of strangers from the internet! They can run models that predict what you ate and show relevant ads.
They're not. Operating systems will be legally required to ask for such samples in some jurisdictions by 2028. Linus has fecal_sample.ko lined up for merge in 7.3 or so.
/s but we jumped to the Black Mirror timeline so who knows?
> moves when you try to move away the mouse over it
They already did that. I sit down at my computer and try to activate the window I want to work in, and the "location" icon temporarily appears in the notification area which causes all the taskbar icons to shift left. I accidentally click the neighboring icon and launch an app that throws up a splash screen for 60 seconds while it loads.
I’m at the point to tell people (friends, neighbors, fellow parents, family, ie, not HN readers) to prolong the life of their existing computers and install what I think is the easiest windows equivalent on their computers: kubuntu.
Gnome is nice and all, but the default ui, and remember defaults matter for a lot of people, is just too jarring.
The people I am talking about just wanna browse the web, go on Facebook and use their gmail. Look at funny YouTube videos. The default KDE ui has that windows start menu and looks roughly the same so they can hit the ground running.
My family switched to Gnome 2 a couple of decades ago. My mother quite liked it and has consistently installed it on every new computer she bought. Her only confusion lately has been with the ubuntu snap packages and how they behave between multiple accounts on the machine.
These days she uses MATE which still offers that Gnome 2 layout. Awesome thing about Linux is that option to fork, so her desktop environment has remained consistent for over 20 years.
Cinnamon has a very classic Windows layout. I am getting very comfortable using MX Linux with KDE, especially that I have been able to move my NVME drive over several laptops now. Starting to get the itch to find a rolling distro to skip reinstalling the OS every two years.
Combine fingerprint biometric with fecal samples for a convenient "fecalprint" button. The user doesn't even have to go into the bathroom! It can be microslops version of Apple's TouchID.
That's a great idea the task bar could just shift to expose a link to sign up for azure/office/OneDrive/CoPilot subscription that the user misclicks on.
first one is a really slick tooltip ui to make sure people read tooltips. hover over button, it slides out while revealing tooltip text in its place, move cursor to button again
if you want to make sure people read a lot of instructions you can chain this so that you need to hover over the button multiple times, revealing the instructions a bit at a time
Windows 11 was built without agentic slop. That's a deduction from the timing of its gestation.
Windows 10 was released in January of 2015.
Windows 11 was released in October of 2021.
So this software disaster is entirely human-made.
Just wait, it will get worse, when the team that built the fantastic Windows 11 builds Windows 12, this time with the power of AI amplifying their amazing system design skills.
You are absolutely right! This was, in fact, an anal probe and you should correct location of the two. Do you want me to start the ID verification process over again?
Hehe, this reminds me of 30 years ago when people used to stylise it as Micro$oft or creatively misspell it as Microshaft, etc. Even on the Amiga, there was the filesystem that could read PC format disks that was called MessyDos. It just seems like the next generation has discovered what an easy name it is to make puns from.
I find it interesting to go back in time so I read the accompanying article and came across this snippet:
> despite the computing apocalypse that Windows XP's Product Activation features were supposed to ignite, I've never had the first problem with it
At the time, I remember a lot of scare stories about how the Product Activation system in Windows XP would result in the death of user freedom. It didn’t effect me because I was using GNU/Linux (probably Mandrake or Mandriva Linux). When I later got a job in an office that ran Windows XP, I don’t remember XP causing any more headaches than any of its predecessors. If anything, it was even more stable than 2000 which itself was superior to 95, 98 or 98SE.
I also fully agree with the last sentence:
> I do think it's clear that the way we use our computers totally pisses off gigantic, wealthy companies of all stripes, and it was only a matter of time until they tried to do something about it.
Part of it was that Microsoft was really more concerned with distributors selling computers with pirated copies of Windows, and they basically would activate anything if you were willing to call.
I remember doing it a few times for the "OEM" Windows XP which was cheaper but not supposed to migrate to new machines.
Thanks for that bit of background. That make sense.
I used to think that MS were probably happy with a certain amount of “piracy” (students, voluntary groups, people starting off as self-employed contractors, etc.) because it kept people in their ecosystem (using MS Office and other Windows-only software), helped reinforce the perception of Windows as being the OS for getting stuff done (either work or games) and some of these “pirates” would become future (paying) customers.
Last week on a comedy show (the daily show) they made a joke about bill gates "micro and soft" which was old in the 90s already, so I can confirm this is the case.
I think this was 100% justifiable use. If the founder of the company is going to be hanging out with pedophiles and sex traffickers, then micro and soft jokes are open season. All of his philanthropic adventures will never wipe his stain clean.
> Daube is a slang word for something of low quality.
Which is fun because it's also a really delicious dish from Provence (south of France) made with beef that has been marinated for multiple hours in red wine.
IIRC with Windows 98 you could just use any product key you had on as many machines as you wanted since there was no activation or real phoning home capabilities. So most likely your whole friend group would be using the same serial that was copied off your uncle's old gateway.
It was "Outhouse Express" and "GruntPage" for me in the late 90s. I still use these for software I find particularly irksome, for example Conscrewence from AtlASSian.
Orgs have had sensitive skin like this for a long time. Gamespy was a service for launching and playing multiplayer games with lobbies before Steam, and if you “accidentally” typed “GaySpy” (it was the early 2000s) it would autocorrect to “GameSpy” by the time it appeared in your messages.
I used to have a M$ email signature 30 years ago, and pay, nowaydays I mostly use Windows on my laptop, because I am not willing to pay Apple prices even though I can afford them, and even last year I was dealing with GNU/Linux installation issues on a Gigabyte BRIX.
Been in this industry since I graduated college, I have never stopped using Micro$oft or Microshaft. Also a fan of M$, Winblows…
Thank goodness their employees have time to crack down on people making fun of them on fucking Discord. That should definitely be the priority of a multi-trillion dollar software company, is making sure your users aren’t mocking you. We don’t need a taskbar that works reliably or anything.
What community is there to house around Microsoft Copilot?
Seriously, why does Microsoft Copilot need a Discord Server?
What do I talk about when I join the Microsoft Copilot server?
What are we doing here?
There are communities who gobble up anything Microsoft produces. People in the Microsoft MVP program are usually in this camp - if you want to find examples. Me and my coder friends were part of the fandom, but with just me and my biased N=10 sample set; this fanbase is evaporating quickly (but I still know some hardcore "azure thumpers").
I'd imagine that there's some discussion about how to make the most out of the tool as well as discussion of experiments and capabilities. I'm not even sure what exactly "Microsoft Copilot" entails anymore because of the multiple rebrands, but having a place where you can discuss exploring plugins and other adjacent features seems useful.
Not quite the same, but recently I was recently looking around for communities centered around Claude Code for discussion about people's workflows as well as discussion about what plugins people are using and if they notice it making a significant difference.
Since the technology is still evolving, having an active community can help you discover new patterns and explore the space more effectively.
> [...] I'm not even sure what exactly "Microsoft Copilot" entails anymore [...]
Watching from the sidelines (not a Microsoft user), I've completely lost track. Between this, the Azure 365 cloud whatever stuff, I have no idea what many of the products even exactly are any more.
Simply put Microsoft is the worst company at naming stuff. Even when they come up with a good name for something, they'll name 3 other totally different products the same thing to maximize confusion.
Seriously? Does anybody know what Copilot is? I don't think I have ever seem a "Copilot user", so I don't know what it looks like. Is it the little macro key on new laptop keyboards? The chatbot you get in Bing? A technical philosophy? Or is it in essence just copilot.com, the mediocre chat interface which you used to get free GPT-4 three years ago?
I wish. I got a Dell laptop for work and they've replaced the right Ctrl key with a Copilot key, and (because it's a locked-down work sysyem) the only thing I can remap that to is the Windows menu. And I keep hitting it out of muscle memory, interrupting everything. But at least now it doesn't launch Copilot.
Which I could add is "the only AI approved for use by IT" because they hate us.
They saw other successful AI products with discords (like midjourney) and then they probably just copied the idea thinking they would get similar success from it.
That's a lot of what big corp america strategy boils down to -- copy your competitors.
Don't get me wrong, creating a passionate community around a product is a great strategy for many reasons, but microsoft never had passionate users in the first place.
And it is telling that they are banning humor and criticism form their community, it shows they do not want have any criticism for their product, which is one of the benefits of community (fast and honest feedback loops). Its sort of like north korea where saying anything bad about the "great leader" or else. That's not a fun community, that is a community people want to leave but can't bc they will get shot at the border.
An awful lot of corporate workers are stuck with Copilot as their only approved chat option, so some of them are probably trying to learn how to get the best results they can from it.
The same as every other Discord server: Giving a few people the feeling of power over dozens of channels with memes and unsearchable low-quality "discussions".
Being Microsoft, you'd think they would just offer a public Teams server instead? Not that you'd get more traction with it, but at least it's in-house and theoretically they would be motivated to build integrations on top.
Pretty ironic, isn't it? You'd think they'd have enough faith in Teams to compete with Discord on this front.
The friction comes from having to sign up for different forums or services. I'd wager fewer people use (or even like) Teams than Discord among the tech enthusiast types who are willing to give them feedback on their product.
For the same reason any company or open-source project uses Discord: it's a quick way to gather feedback and study how people use your products, without forcing users to sign up for something new if they already use Discord with a wide range of other servers.
> The Streisand effect describes a situation where an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information results in the unintended consequence of the effort instead increasing public awareness of the information.
I don't take this lightly.
These are the folks who are doing what they can to be part of the government.
They simply cannot take criticism and this seems to be a pattern moving forward.
Oh no, how will people signal that some functionality or product in general is what they'd previously been referring as Mircolosp? er, Microsolps. wait, that's not it either, Macroslop. Micro$lop. Microsplo. Sorry, so many typos! but you know what I mean.
Microsoft, can you please let me remove recommendations from the start menu? Not just less recommendations. I want the category to not be displayed and taking up space.
That's hilarious, I didn't realize you couldn't turn it off. I just tried disabling all the recommendation options and it still shows the category, except now instead of recommended items, it says "to show your recent files and apps, turn them on in Settings."
This sort of thing used to bother me back when I took Windows seriously.
What I heard is you would like some highly relevant ads to be at the top of your start menu for your convenience every time you want to start a program.
It's been a while since I used Windows as a daily driver, but I did oscillate between W10 and Arch for about half a year, and the Arch mentality creeped into Windows. I ended up adding a context menu to Explorer so I could paste images on my clipboard directly to a the folder I had open. I had to create keys in the Explorer portions of the registry.
If I could do that, I'm sure you can root around in the Start Menu parts of the registry and rip it out.
I know I can because I've done it on my home machine, but my work computer is restricted by IT. I can't open regedit or install most software unfortunately.
Because it comes 'free' with an Office365 subscription. Embrace (<<you are here), extend, extinguish.
It's usually 'management'. The same management that won't pay for developer tools (including Slack) because 'why do you need that when you can do 95% of your work in VSCode?' It's also usually the same sort of management that can do 95% of their documents in... VSCode and markdown. Or LibreOffice.
Having been in the position, on a corporate Active Directory network it very much easier to roll out Teams than anything else. It works fine at the kind of internal video calls that companies spend their days on.
I don't think M$ does much dogfooding. The kinds of issues I encounter being forced to use their pan-awfuly for work makes me very skeptical of this idea.
It's not. It's an independent company, that's most likely going to IPO soon. Microsoft was reported to be in talks to acquire Discord at some point, but that never materialised.
This just means I'm going to say microslop in random places - documents, slides, emails and Teams chats. "Copilot 365" is welcome to give me a red squigly all it wants.
The default of making a public discord for your project/company always seemed like a bad idea anyway. It’ll always devolve into some drama or distracting overhead to moderate it
But to be fair, corporate discords have to be like that. Why not create your own channel with your colleagues instead? This discussion would be "private" and corporate can just ignore it.
> create your own channel with your colleagues instead
Dont even think about it ... it will be private till it isnt then, it will be the reason you are fired. Its corpo world - shut your mouth and dont put anything on a permanent record you dont have to.
If I were to bet on what would get a Microsoft Discord server shut down, I would have put money on discussions of the ties between Microsoft executives and Epstein. They should be happy if the worst thing that's happening is a mildly deragatory nickname.
It's not a vocab problem. It's inherent to the human brain, which appears to be fundamentally designed to prefer to view the world in terms of stories, with heroes, villains, and a narrative arc.
You don't have to tell me - even Bill S: "and what's he then that says I play the villain?"
Unfortunately, the collective quality of our storytelling is waning. Most people watch the least common denominator.
So now the greater human truth you allude to is being filtered through the streaming age mode of storytelling, and people have arcs, and bingo cards, and everything is reduced to water-cooler levels of urgency and relevance.
This isn't a new thing. Ancient stories like the Iliad or the Odyssey are discreetly historical records of a particular region mixed in with mythological foundations of a particular culture, but framed as the stories of Achilles ("Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.") and Odysseus ("Speak, memory, of the cunning hero, the wanderer, blown off course time and again after he plundered Troy's sacred heights."). Likewise, ancient fables and parables are moral lessons couched in terms of stories with protagonists whose actions demonstrate the intended lesson, and this sort of thing is universal across every ancient culture for which we have records. Stories stick in the human mind, and they're what humans most prioritize transmitting forward through time.
When Microslop bans "Microslop" I don't need to try. I use their software daily, I know how their technical support is utterly fucked now and how rare the heroic power user actually solving the case for every co-sufferer has become. And I know I'm not alone.
Just recently they fixed the Win 11 start menu bug where they forgot to expose any functionality behind the "hide mobile pane" button. At least the forced recents are gone now, Jesus Christ! This is toddler level software engineering.
It's a corporation suffering from corporate things and the ridiculously out of control financialization of everything, feeding on its insane first mover advantage and network effects. This attempt to hide it is simply embarrassing.
There's only gonna be so much thinking or research involved and forget contacting primary sources or anything like that.
The way people react to criticism tells you a lot about how deep your remark cut. Clearly Microsoft people know their stuff is slop and are having a hard time coping with that.
Microslop? Hmm... Never heard that before! Meanwhile, I just randomly remembered that I haven't opened a couple of dozen social media accounts in ages. BRB!
Before this article I'd have thought that Microslop was used to designate small snippets of AI slop, like "Let that sync in" or "And to be honest" and "It's not X, it's Y" and "Deepdive" and "Delve".
But nice to see that MS is Streisanding their way to a nice new nickname!
What were the sloperators of that channel thinking?
In any case, it should be Micro$lop (may not be banned...yet).
> Microsoft's brand image may already be at an all-time low
and they decide to make it even worse. it's extremely obvious this would be an objectively terrible PR move. you always take banter on the chin and show that you're working on improving the product.
instead, they try to clamp down on the banter, which, without fail, achieves the exact opposite: banter increases tenfold and you get ridiculed for being overly sensitive to actual criticism
> the software giant can’t risk getting more hatred towards their expensive investment in Copilot, especially since Microsoft’s head start in AI is starting to be overshadowed by competitors like Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and maybe even Apple in the near future
This sentence is from TFA, and I can't for the life of me understand it. "Head start"?? WTF?
It's kind of interesting that Microsoft is deemphasizing if not exiting making products for individuals to decide to buy. Contrast that with Google, who have to actively cultivate individual customers in order to have a large and reliable audience for ad based monetization of search, maps, and other free at the point of use products.
There are good and understandable reasons to not want to be in the games business. Game studios are frequently a hot bed of sexual predation and just horrifyingly bad management in general. But it's a business with a large customer base that wouldn't be customers otherwise.
Microsoft has spent tens of billions of dollars acquiring game studios and their IP. They're going to have to make a decision to cultivate growth in that business or sell it for whatever they can get for it. Neither of those choices will be easy to execute well.
You can't build a community if you ban everything except soulless corporate dronespeak. Nobody would ever be interested in joining it without getting paid for it. That's a business meeting, not a community.
Yeah that's what LinkedIn in is for. If they just want people or bots to just fawn over everything they put out. I'm glad M$ is getting called out for the slip they put out.
Given that nobody else banned it we can now blame Microsoft for taking down the only decent online community. Now we are stuck on hackernews and its ilk.
Decent communities that strive for a high standard of conversation like r/credibledefense/ will immediately ban you for posting such nonsense.
Go look and tell me that's not one of the best curated communities on the internet, despite specifically covering incredibly controversial topics. HN is good but doesn't even come close.
Personally I think 2000s Micro$oft would be disappointed that 2026 Microslop is hosting user communities on a 3rd party platform owned other another company rather than using their own competitor.
You can argue that banning insults is a bad look, bad move, that the insult is warranted or whatever, but are you really going to die on the hill that calling the company Microslop isn't insulting?
People do work at Microsoft though and they're probably aren't very happy when their work is called slop. You could even say they are feeling insulted or offended.
I'd agree but if you ever been on the receiving end of a meme-train you'd see that it's not driven by rationality. I'm not familiar with this issue but my bet would be that even hand-crafted personal projects were being called slop because once meme runs away from initial meaning it just becomes closer to swear word than a meaning.
See, that requires the code to be written by an actual human being, who has agency and a sense of pride and ownership about their work.
Maybe there are still some teams deep inside the bowels of Microsoft that management has forgotten about that still operate like that, but judging by the way the user-facing parts of its products have developed, the mass firings, and the pushing of AI-driven development by upper management, it seems very clear to me that there's very little risk of insulting anything anyone actually cares about.
The branding people will hate it. Although IMHO the best thing they could do is co-opt it as a feedback term and acknowledge that AI can be hit or miss.
It is definitely an insult because it’s used pejoratively. If it is insulting I guess depends on if the target feels insulted. Seeing as they blocked the word, it seems they do.
If anything it is a diminutive for a company which really should have named itself Megaslop by now if not Gigaslop or even Teraslop. Poor little Microslop, are those people being nasty again?
It is supposed to indicate Microsoft cares only about money, which to me too, seems in the same league as microslop, i.e. mildly insulting but really not rude enough to be worth censoring.
And other insults are just words as well. It's the intention, history, connotation etc. behind words that give them meaning. M$ is meant as an insult, hence it's insulting. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/M$
They can do a bad thing, and then you can make fun of it with an insult.
Own it, the insult is warranted, why hide and pretend it's not an insult.
If Microsoft is consistently shipping slop, then they deserve insults over it; not every "bad" thing is always unwarranted. Locking someone in a box is "bad", prison is a necessary thing that benefits society. Insults are "bad" and sometimes warranted.
I think the most important question here is this: Are users who post the string "microslop" generally desirable participants that will contribute in a productive manner?
It depends what the purpose of the Discord channel is. Is it for open and frank discussion, or for MS drones to discuss Copilot development. It's a cliche, but banning certain words smacks of 1984-style censorship.
An even more important question is: why does Microsoft care so much about a handful of people using that term that they are willing to risk getting Streisanded over it?
Nobody cares about banning the few idiots who do nothing but spam "MICROSLOP SUCKS MICROSLOP SUCKS". But banning the entire term "microslop", just in case someone might use it? Well, what kind of response were they expecting?
>An even more important question is: why does Microsoft care so much about a handful of people using that term that they are willing to risk getting Streisanded over it?
Because the decision was made by some normal adult without mental health issues who hasn't internalized just how disturbed some people on the internet are?
It really shouldn't be unreasonable for moderators to try to maintain a professional tone. Although in this case they certainly picked the wrong platform if "professional" was what they were going for.
This is one of those things that's hard to understand without practical moderation experience. The presence of an insulting meme creates the idiots who spam it, and creates a larger category of people who deploy it to toxify what would otherwise be polite and respectful discussion. And low quality comments that get a couple laugh reacts, even if you can consistently remove them within the hour, are fully capable of propagating it.
Keyword bans are definitely a heavy-handed option, they do risk the Streisand effect, and in the worst case that can require the scorched-earth counterresponse described in the source article. But sometimes there's just no other way to kill the meme.
Windows 11 is definitely failing in weird ways for me, I don't know if it's due to slop. The latest example is that I can't launch Notepad via the start menu... I can launch other apps though.
I have this problem with calc.exe. Sometimes it'll launch from the start menu, but often won't. I pinned it to the taskbar, but muscle memory is a powerful force, so I usually try to launch it from the start menu first.
Enshitification doesn't roll off the tongue quite the same way. You have 10,000 systems all each interacting at a 90% success rate when it needs to be 99.999%.
They fired all the SDETs 11 years ago. It's catching up with them.
Hateful speech, really? If we called it Micro$hit maybe.... but if they are going to be buthurt because a bunch of gamers and sysadmins are annoyed at the horrific direction the company is taking, then they deserve it.
I don't know for certain, but moderators (on a company Discord) are likely random people in a 3rd world country that are payed peanuts and that is their only income. If higher ups tell them "I don't want to see the Microslop word anywhere" they just do it.
You should be angry at the higher ups that instead of saying: "maybe they are right and we can do better" they decided to hide the problem through censorship. Which, btw, always has the opposite effect of putting what you are trying to hide in the spotlight.
Do you work for Microsoft or something? Please do do not give them ideas.
How incompetent must they be not to realize the Copilot brand is now beyond toxic. I wonder who came up with the Copilot name internally that they continue to triple own on that name despite really strong signals indicating it has failed.
Then you have to tell copilot what you wanted to do and then copilot will do it for you.
You: clicks on web browser in task bar
Copilot: I see you clicked on your web browser. Do you want to open your web browser?
You: Yes.
Copilot: Great. I will do that for you. Opens browser What website did you want to go to? Youtube? learn.microsoft.com?
You: P***hub
Copilot: Unfortunately, that site violates our community guidelines, so I cannot take you there.
You: Types in the address
Copilot: Oh. I see. You think you're allowed to go to websites that I said you're not allowed to go to? Who the fuck do you think you are? I SAID NO! Try it again and I'll call in a drone strike, bitch. redirects to learn.microsoft.com
Very few things trigger me more than this doublespeak.
/s but we jumped to the Black Mirror timeline so who knows?
They already did that. I sit down at my computer and try to activate the window I want to work in, and the "location" icon temporarily appears in the notification area which causes all the taskbar icons to shift left. I accidentally click the neighboring icon and launch an app that throws up a splash screen for 60 seconds while it loads.
Only on premium subscriptions, for free users you need your neighbour's stool sample.
To protect the children.
Gnome is nice and all, but the default ui, and remember defaults matter for a lot of people, is just too jarring.
The people I am talking about just wanna browse the web, go on Facebook and use their gmail. Look at funny YouTube videos. The default KDE ui has that windows start menu and looks roughly the same so they can hit the ground running.
These days she uses MATE which still offers that Gnome 2 layout. Awesome thing about Linux is that option to fork, so her desktop environment has remained consistent for over 20 years.
So why not to create a M365 account? International dispatch to the US :D
if you want to make sure people read a lot of instructions you can chain this so that you need to hover over the button multiple times, revealing the instructions a bit at a time
Windows 10 was released in January of 2015.
Windows 11 was released in October of 2021.
So this software disaster is entirely human-made.
Just wait, it will get worse, when the team that built the fantastic Windows 11 builds Windows 12, this time with the power of AI amplifying their amazing system design skills.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
Best we can hope for is Microsoft dogfoods the feature first.
a micro shit (tm)
On a similar, nostalgic note, I recall boot screens for "Sinnlos 98" floating around, back when modifying the bootup logo was a thing.
funnily enough works just fine in Polish
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/22/m
> despite the computing apocalypse that Windows XP's Product Activation features were supposed to ignite, I've never had the first problem with it
At the time, I remember a lot of scare stories about how the Product Activation system in Windows XP would result in the death of user freedom. It didn’t effect me because I was using GNU/Linux (probably Mandrake or Mandriva Linux). When I later got a job in an office that ran Windows XP, I don’t remember XP causing any more headaches than any of its predecessors. If anything, it was even more stable than 2000 which itself was superior to 95, 98 or 98SE.
I also fully agree with the last sentence:
> I do think it's clear that the way we use our computers totally pisses off gigantic, wealthy companies of all stripes, and it was only a matter of time until they tried to do something about it.
I remember doing it a few times for the "OEM" Windows XP which was cheaper but not supposed to migrate to new machines.
I used to think that MS were probably happy with a certain amount of “piracy” (students, voluntary groups, people starting off as self-employed contractors, etc.) because it kept people in their ecosystem (using MS Office and other Windows-only software), helped reinforce the perception of Windows as being the OS for getting stuff done (either work or games) and some of these “pirates” would become future (paying) customers.
Things only went downhill from there.
Daube is a slang word for something of low quality.
Which is fun because it's also a really delicious dish from Provence (south of France) made with beef that has been marinated for multiple hours in red wine.
"If you play the Win98 CD backwards, it summons Satan. It's worse when you play it forwards - it installs Windows"
Ah, good times... :-)
> Last week, I left my 2 XP CDs on my dashboard in plain view. Someone broke into my car and left 2 more.
> The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck is the day they make a vacuum cleaner.
> A Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer is to computing what a McDonalds Certified Food Specialist is to fine cuisine
Juvenile some might say, but they still makes me giggle.
good times :)
I think there were at least three other commonly used codes, but this one was by far the most popular.
Thank goodness their employees have time to crack down on people making fun of them on fucking Discord. That should definitely be the priority of a multi-trillion dollar software company, is making sure your users aren’t mocking you. We don’t need a taskbar that works reliably or anything.
Not quite the same, but recently I was recently looking around for communities centered around Claude Code for discussion about people's workflows as well as discussion about what plugins people are using and if they notice it making a significant difference.
Since the technology is still evolving, having an active community can help you discover new patterns and explore the space more effectively.
Watching from the sidelines (not a Microsoft user), I've completely lost track. Between this, the Azure 365 cloud whatever stuff, I have no idea what many of the products even exactly are any more.
Which I could add is "the only AI approved for use by IT" because they hate us.
I'm pretty sure Clippy and Rover had a child and it got bit by a radioactive LLM.
That's a lot of what big corp america strategy boils down to -- copy your competitors.
Don't get me wrong, creating a passionate community around a product is a great strategy for many reasons, but microsoft never had passionate users in the first place.
And it is telling that they are banning humor and criticism form their community, it shows they do not want have any criticism for their product, which is one of the benefits of community (fast and honest feedback loops). Its sort of like north korea where saying anything bad about the "great leader" or else. That's not a fun community, that is a community people want to leave but can't bc they will get shot at the border.
(Microsoft _actually_ encouraged 'fans' to have Windows 7 Launch Parties...)
I stopped paying attention after a while as they get repetitive.
I haven't used the Discord, but having a place to ask for help using it doesn't seem farfetched.
The friction comes from having to sign up for different forums or services. I'd wager fewer people use (or even like) Teams than Discord among the tech enthusiast types who are willing to give them feedback on their product.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
> The Streisand effect describes a situation where an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information results in the unintended consequence of the effort instead increasing public awareness of the information.
This sort of thing used to bother me back when I took Windows seriously.
Oh, and have you heard about OneDrive?
It's been a while since I used Windows as a daily driver, but I did oscillate between W10 and Arch for about half a year, and the Arch mentality creeped into Windows. I ended up adding a context menu to Explorer so I could paste images on my clipboard directly to a the folder I had open. I had to create keys in the Explorer portions of the registry.
If I could do that, I'm sure you can root around in the Start Menu parts of the registry and rip it out.
It's usually 'management'. The same management that won't pay for developer tools (including Slack) because 'why do you need that when you can do 95% of your work in VSCode?' It's also usually the same sort of management that can do 95% of their documents in... VSCode and markdown. Or LibreOffice.
Maybe this is the real reason why companies want to use AI so badly.
They save money on salary but also they get to point at something they won't tattle against the executives during a plea bargain?
I've never called them MircoSlop before, I haven't even written the word. But it's now my exclusive word for the company.
All I can hear is, it's working.
And they're already moderation a light hearted joke about their low quality products.
Doesn't really bode well for the future product Vision.
Let's get it out there and make this happen!
But to be fair, corporate discords have to be like that. Why not create your own channel with your colleagues instead? This discussion would be "private" and corporate can just ignore it.
Dont even think about it ... it will be private till it isnt then, it will be the reason you are fired. Its corpo world - shut your mouth and dont put anything on a permanent record you dont have to.
Is this what the employees do nowadays while their AI is generating code?
Your complaint is that young people use English in a way you dislike.
Unfortunately, the collective quality of our storytelling is waning. Most people watch the least common denominator.
So now the greater human truth you allude to is being filtered through the streaming age mode of storytelling, and people have arcs, and bingo cards, and everything is reduced to water-cooler levels of urgency and relevance.
Just recently they fixed the Win 11 start menu bug where they forgot to expose any functionality behind the "hide mobile pane" button. At least the forced recents are gone now, Jesus Christ! This is toddler level software engineering.
It's a corporation suffering from corporate things and the ridiculously out of control financialization of everything, feeding on its insane first mover advantage and network effects. This attempt to hide it is simply embarrassing.
There's only gonna be so much thinking or research involved and forget contacting primary sources or anything like that.
You might consider completely reversing this position for the rest of your life.
Most of our world is a fiction or at least a highly distorted version of reality.
My advice to people is: Get out into nature, stop believing everything on the news and meet people in person.
Most of the news is ragebait designed to get you angry at specific targets rather than the systems themselves.
No one in my circles said this, now I've heard it twice now through headlines of Microsoft trying to punish or block it.
Now I've started saying it too.
Has a nice ring to it.
Thank you Streisand effect!
But nice to see that MS is Streisanding their way to a nice new nickname!
What were the sloperators of that channel thinking?
In any case, it should be Micro$lop (may not be banned...yet).
> Microsoft's brand image may already be at an all-time low
and they decide to make it even worse. it's extremely obvious this would be an objectively terrible PR move. you always take banter on the chin and show that you're working on improving the product.
instead, they try to clamp down on the banter, which, without fail, achieves the exact opposite: banter increases tenfold and you get ridiculed for being overly sensitive to actual criticism
"Hello, copilot, do you create slop? -> Skibidi slop slop slop aiiiiiii"
This sentence is from TFA, and I can't for the life of me understand it. "Head start"?? WTF?
Unless you're into that kind of thing.
There are good and understandable reasons to not want to be in the games business. Game studios are frequently a hot bed of sexual predation and just horrifyingly bad management in general. But it's a business with a large customer base that wouldn't be customers otherwise.
Microsoft has spent tens of billions of dollars acquiring game studios and their IP. They're going to have to make a decision to cultivate growth in that business or sell it for whatever they can get for it. Neither of those choices will be easy to execute well.
MicroslopSlop
Wouldn't any community that wants to encourage good quality conversations immediately ban everyone posting stupid slashdot-esque jokes like this?
I think there's a big difference between having high standards and the slop that is LinkedIn.
Go look and tell me that's not one of the best curated communities on the internet, despite specifically covering incredibly controversial topics. HN is good but doesn't even come close.
"Bad Bot Problem" (Computerphile)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjQNDCYL5Rg
Corporate personhood at its finest.
If it offends you so much that people call your work as it is, you should do better work, grow some thicker skin, or stop.
Maybe there are still some teams deep inside the bowels of Microsoft that management has forgotten about that still operate like that, but judging by the way the user-facing parts of its products have developed, the mass firings, and the pushing of AI-driven development by upper management, it seems very clear to me that there's very little risk of insulting anything anyone actually cares about.
"M$" may not be insulting in itself, but it's certainly typically associated with insultingly poor writing.
In notepad.
They can do a bad thing, and then you can make fun of it with an insult.
Own it, the insult is warranted, why hide and pretend it's not an insult.
If Microsoft is consistently shipping slop, then they deserve insults over it; not every "bad" thing is always unwarranted. Locking someone in a box is "bad", prison is a necessary thing that benefits society. Insults are "bad" and sometimes warranted.
I suspect not.
So... 4chan? Why would you possibly want that in this context?
Although, you're posting on HN so it's probably fair to assume that "open and frank discussion" isn't a very high priority for you.
Nobody cares about banning the few idiots who do nothing but spam "MICROSLOP SUCKS MICROSLOP SUCKS". But banning the entire term "microslop", just in case someone might use it? Well, what kind of response were they expecting?
Because the decision was made by some normal adult without mental health issues who hasn't internalized just how disturbed some people on the internet are?
It really shouldn't be unreasonable for moderators to try to maintain a professional tone. Although in this case they certainly picked the wrong platform if "professional" was what they were going for.
Keyword bans are definitely a heavy-handed option, they do risk the Streisand effect, and in the worst case that can require the scorched-earth counterresponse described in the source article. But sometimes there's just no other way to kill the meme.
It's Microsoft's official Copilot Discord. Microsoft banned the word
They fired all the SDETs 11 years ago. It's catching up with them.
What are they going to do? Ban me from using their operating system?
microslop.com
>Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
You should be angry at the higher ups that instead of saying: "maybe they are right and we can do better" they decided to hide the problem through censorship. Which, btw, always has the opposite effect of putting what you are trying to hide in the spotlight.
But if you don't want childish behaviour, Discord is an ... interesting choice.