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PaperclipPerfector  14hr ago (text post)   528 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 30, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Fuck Microsoft and their business model.

I work in closed networks separated from the broader Internet. The version of Windows we chose still tries to shove telemetry and AI bullshit down our throats. If you try to open a pdf, it’ll launch Edge, bitch about how that’s not your default browser, go through two separate dialogues to warn that you’re “starting without your data,” and grudgingly open the document. All while frantically phoning home and shitting out bland, corporate Memphis error pages. Every “app” has a useless Copilot button. God knows what happens if you try to use it.

I can’t tell if our IT guys just didn’t bother to disable this crap or if Microsoft doesn’t allow it even through group policy. It’s inconvenient and aesthetically offensive. Fucky-wucky indeed.

It's very hard to turn it off for any one specific thing, extremely prone to reverting, and sometimes just twigs itself into an error state for no perceivable reason. GPO helps, but it surprising what's missing. The AI stuff is getting the most flak, but it's been a problem dating back years before Attention Is All You Need with OneDrive and with the Office365 world.

There's a few arguments in favor of these technologies. I hate OneDrive, but I've also spent an hour this morning recovering data for an employee that didn't realize his 'backup' thumb drive had an expiry date, and forcing online backups may well be the only way for normies to have backups. Natural language text and image search is an incredibly compelling use case for LLMs; the new OCR is incredible compared to what's available five years ago; Office365, as bad as its version control and collaboration is, still works better than non-techies shipping files around by e-mail and getting into version control hell.

But Microsoft seems hellbent on simultaneously making them impossible to opt-out of and incredibly shitty to use in any way but the default, or to opt-out for specific situations. WhiningCoil's use case is one of the most obvious problems -- you really don't want to mix a framework upgrade and a refactor, and an LLM's going to do that far more often than a simple script would -- but it's everywhere now. And it's not like there's any serious business case for most of it: Microsoft isn't getting any serious amount of cash from people using Edge.

I've been holding my nose, and my MSFT stock, for years despite all this. As much as I hate what they are doing, line keeps going up.

Until two days ago. I'm not sure if it's a sea change yet, or a mere blip. I just have no idea how much enshittification Microsoft can get away with due to lock in effect, and I don't think anyone does. But I do know, I will be advocating to migrate away from MS at every opportunity I get. Or at least have the concepts of a plan in place should the enshittification truly become so bad we are left with no choice.

I genuinely don't understand Microsoft's long term business model here.

It genuinely seems like they think customers are obsolete, and they can sell B2B services forever.

The problem is, compared to a lot of other providers in the space, they are pretty terrible. If it weren't for the ball-crushingly-tight vendor lock in that they have on the desktop and office suite space, I don't know if anyone would ever use them. Despite that fact, it feels like they're at best neglecting those two moats, and at worst actively trying to kill them. It's baffling.

It feels like they're in the early phases of what turned IBM from what it used to be to... whatever it is now

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