Microsoft never fails to disappoint
Be Skype. You literally are the first one. You literally are the only one. Covid happens. Zoom pops up from nowhere and takes everyone. You die.
Still, still, I’m like, how???
It’s really so funny to watch when you don’t use any of their junk
It is much more enjoyable
Failing successfully tho.
Huh. I guess Microsoft and I have that in common.
🥁
You forgot the symbol crash at the end. How disappointing.
Typical!
Greentext on X?
Nah, green is woke.
Their idea was that OpenAI was so far ahead of the competition no one could ever catch up. Turns out they weren’t and now they’re at the bottom.
Google: “We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI”. Prophetic words.
It’s so beautiful to read a giant corporation realise that they are hopeless and have no game to play.
At the bottom? Is there a single LLM that has surpassed ChatGPT?
Claude
Claude outperforms in coding and agentic tasks. I asked about LLM as a chat model. It’s still in benchmarks at the top, and still the most popular one, by far.
Even with Claude, the difference isn’t big and it’s the only one that managed to surpass it in benchmarks, so… still - at the bottom? You sure about that?
The context was about coding specifically tho
It is impressive how much better claude is than copilot specifically for coding.
Like… how much bullshit is in Windows to learn off of, let alone github.
I see this as proof of how bad LLMs actually are. You have an AI trained on essentially humanity’s collective programming library. Languages of machines and computers. The result should be ungodly and near perfection. If there was any semblance of understanding in AI, it should be revealed in it’s capability to produce code.
Although… I can definitely see Microsoft thinking that their code is the example of perfection and training copilot on that rather than github.
should be ungodly and near perfection
Counterpoint: garbage in, garbage out
Oh right, that.
Your proof of how bad LLMs are is the fact that there are a bunch of other companies producing way better coding agents and coding models than Microsoft is? I’m not sure how that follows. Those other agents are good, that’s the point of this.
I would (probably not literally) wager that by “this” they meant *looks around at entire world*…
this
It’s wild to me that people are constantly complaining how “bad” LLMs are, because what, it can make mistakes or it’s not orders of magnitude smarter than the smartest humans???
It makes mistakes with an alarming frequency, all with the same confident tone of writing as when it says anything else. It’s wrong so often that you’d need to use another source of information just to confirm it, which defeats the point in using AI in the first place!
It’s not smarter than the smartest humans, or even AS smart as them, or even as smart as REGULAR humans. It’s not even smart. It’s a magic eight ball that sometimes has the correct answer by pure chance. No intellect. No reasoning. Just probability.
Also: It steals from just about everyone; it encourages suicides and mass shootings; it’s frequently racist in its outputs; it’s burning, boiling and polluting the planet; it’s being forced on people who don’t want it; and billionares are using it to manipulate people. Probably some other stuff I forgot to mention.
Just in case you weren’t sure why AI is bad.
Eh, no. If you think you can offload your mental burdens onto any single source, then that’s a you problem, not an AI problem. LLMs are still getting better, but I don’t think we should hold our breaths to them getting to a point where no verification is needed. If you asked a human subject matter expert an important question, would you verify or would you just assume not only that they’re right, but also that you understood them correctly?
But your post really embodies everything that is off with AI “critique” on Lemmy. One paragraph: LLMs are just random (unlike true intellect which somehow presumably don’t emerge from probabilistic phenomena?). Next paragraph: LLMs are racist.
To be clear, the way AI is being pushed is bad in many different ways, and you didn’t even mention the worst examples which in my mind would be how AIs are currently being used to kill people, for example it is likely that it helped the US to murder 170 children in Minab. But again, that’s not a technology issue, it’s an issue with how humans interact with technology.
LLMs are random. Its weighted randomness that frequently values racist outputs like whitewashing a crowd or calling black people monkies (to name two recent examples), but it is still random. That’s why you can ask it the same question twice and get two different answers.
Ever notice how AI defenders try to pretend the technology is better than it is, and brush past the countless failings and ethical failures inherent to the technology by condemning humanity? A bad toolsmith blames the worker, I guess. At a certain point, if the technology is only doing bad things, or doing things badly, it might just be bad technology.
“if they’re gonna steal, they should at least do it right” I mean, I can see how someone would want to think that, but I’m fine with them failing to steal.
I don’t know the original author’s opinions on AI, but I think it’s still fair to say that it was clearly Copilot’s goal to steal all the code and be good, and they had all the code, and so ethics aside one would expect them to have succeeded with flying colour at whatever their goals were, even if those were bad goals.
But they failed instead, which is impressive.
Lol! Be like GitLab instead:
1 - Be the underdog with good reputation in a market completely monopolized;
2 - Have the incumbent self-destruct by vibecoding its product and pushing AI above every other feature to its customers;
3 - Loudly announce that you are leaving your past good behavior behind, and that you are betting everything on vibecoding and pushing AI to your customers!
The US Govt. as a customer, and the forges they operate / contract, being pushed to use AI is probably (unfortunately) a huge piece of this problem.
Yeah the push to use AI comes from above, and it’s not just in the US. Anyone who’s at the top levels of any company now can tell you that the party line is AI positivity and insistence that workers adopt it into their workflows, even if they themselves see little use for it or can find a way to incorporate it into their own workflows yet.
Well, they have a choice of pandering to this one large customer for whom they’ll always be the untrusted underdog, or pandering for the larger, more diverse market.
They never managed to become profitable as the untrusted underdog, so the option of keeping doing the same was obvious, I guess.
Just like Skype getting lapped by Zoom during COVID
Microsoft could have been king with with chatgpt for personal superapp, github copilot for developers and something like sharepoint/power vibe widgets. But nooo, they make windows recall when ai models can’t run locally
if they had made a unified copilot agent they would have won. Think open claw with the power of NPUs for small tasks and cloud for big queries dedicated APIs for interacting with all the microsoft products special tailored version for developers. More focus on retrieving information and doing small tasks for the user than generating slop.
The first versions they released were so fucking bad and every app had basically just a chatbot with zero functionality. It ruined the product for when it could actually do tasks.
It is truly, deeply amazing how bad Microsoft is. Proton on Linux is FASTER than the actual directX it’s emulating is on windows. They got beat at their own instruction layer.
And they had Skype, which was practically a genericized trademark for “video call–” until first Apple’s FaceTime and then Zoom utterly took them apart.
And they had Office, which defined the product category so completely that it’s called “office software–” but then Google Docs took them apart on a molecular level.
Microsoft is the king of snatching defeat from the clutching jaws of victory.
And discord somehow took everyone from skype.
And from TeamSpeak.
Microsoft acquired Skype, did not create it. Then destryed it with its own hands.
It wasn’t that they destroyed it, it was more that they let it bit rot. Skype was honestly never a great user experience by today’s standards. The audio was bad, the connection was very unstable over mobile networks, and push notifications for calls was hit or miss. Microsoft acquired it, slapped a Microsoft login screen on it and then basically didn’t do anything to improve it. Meanwhile, Google created and killed seventy different video calling apps, which all worked better than Skype, and Apple stuck the landing with FaceTime.
Actually, they didn’t just let Skype rot, they changed a bunch of things on it for the worse IMO. Skype used to be peer to peer (I believe the name is literally supposed to be a combination of “sky” and “peer to peer”), MS took that away to funnel it all through Azure. They redesigned the UI multiple times trying to follow the trend of whatever new app became popular (one was clearly trying the be a knockoff Snapchat). They forced all users to create Microsoft accounts to keep using Skype.
Not all their changes were bad, they did finally make a Linux client, which after many years became stable enough to use.
They acquired practically everything they have. They haven’t created anything truly new since the mid-90s.
which defined the product category so completely that it’s called “office software–”
Err, no it’s called office software because it’s software you use in an office. Microsoft didn’t invent the word “office”.
but then Google Docs took them apart
Tapping the breaks on that one.
Google Docs is very lightweight, but it’s also very stripped down. Word remains the first choice in word processors for 90% of the market. It (and Excel) are a big reason offices haven’t seriously begun abandoning Microsoft.
Not being able to paste a jpg of a screenshot into an Excel sheet embedded in a Word document is a feature.
I posit that the vast majority of users of Office would be just fine with any of the lightweight web app equivalents.
I think we’ll eventually see folks migrate to Jupiter Notebook style data entry and management. But they’re relatively new and not well-integrated into modern workflows.
For the time being, people are brought into offices and trained on Excel, get comfortable with Excel, and continue to use Excel because that’s how they spend the bulk of their hours. You’ve got networking effect and priors cementing these apps as the go-to for an entire generation.
100%
Excel is the one actual critical application because it deals with data (and formulae), data which is only useful when you maintain its integrity (hopefully you’re not storing dates).
Word is just a shitty application for text. Needs that can usually be adequately addressed by a plain text file (or plain text email). It thinks it’s a desktop publishing application (goodbye MS Publisher). Any tool that can do rudimentary text processing will suffice for the vast majority of use cases. One might have footnotes and some meta data that might be important, other apps do that well. Even markdown can do that.
PowerPoint, likewise, is a shitty slide show application. Any equivalent will suffice.
There’s quite a few other apps, I forget those.
Word is just a shitty application for text.
It’s fine. People love to shit on the app because Microsoft Bad. But it’s living at the rough midpoint of application quality, at least in it’s modern incarnation.
PowerPoint, likewise, is a shitty slide show application.
As a slideshow app, it’s another perfectly fine piece of software.
What’s disgusting about PowerPoint isn’t the app but the LinkedIn psychos who use it
I don’t think that’s the case, but I only have anecdotal evidence for that. I haven’t ever worked at a company where Office was the preference, and the last three I’ve worked at didn’t even offer it as a default. And I’m in my forties.
I’d never use Google Docs for any long-form writing. I wouldn’t even trust the online nature of it, not having the file stored locally.
Many govt agencies around the world pay for Office 365 or similars. Where I work (govt health), some higher ups demand pro-level M$ office accounts. Those ain’t cheap.
I suspect the vast majority of USA govt (state and federal), plus many European govts, pay a fortune for Office
I haven’t ever worked at a company where Office was the preference,
I haven’t worked at an office where it wasn’t. And I’ve done years of consulting at Deloitte, so I’ve seen a few places.
Fair, which is why anecdote isn’t the singular of data I guess.
Virtually every company I’ve worked at used Office primarily. And by the looks of the other comments your experience seems to be atypical.
Fair enough.
Tapping the breaks on that one.
You don’t wanna do that. The whole thing could shatter!
They also had Internet Explorer. When it was released it was actually good (compared to the competition). Internet Explorer was dominant, but then it turned into the punching bag for web browser memes.
I think that Microsoft is paralyzed by corporate culture. Everything needs to be signed off by multiple stakeholders, everything needs a dozen meetings before anyone can make a decision, and as a result the stuff that’s “good enough” (read: still making money) languishes–or worse, becomes a dumping ground for whatever corporate pet project is exciting–until it’s unacceptably awful, mired under decades of technical debt and spaghetti code fixes.
At least they have the sense to let the successful companies they acquire manage themselves. There’s no AI in Minecraft, for instance.
Is Google Docs as popular as Microsoft Office?
I work in finance/insurance and can’t see a way to move away for Excel (there’s still there spreadsheets with 10+ years still being used).
My wife’s company uses GDocs, but they’re do food research and barely uses those programs.
This is because Microsoft intentionally breaks excel and PP compatibility with Google docs in small but important ways. It’s the only thing keeping them afloat at this point. I have gotten into heated debates at work over this, because I prefer Google docs, but my boss will be like “we need to deliver this to customers who will open it in office and the formatting will break” and I’m like “that’s what a pdf is for.”
yup. anything you ship to anyone should be PDF regardless.
I would doubt it, it is nowhere near as good as office and google sheets specifically has much smaller worksheets than excel, with only 26 rows.
Do you mean… columns?
But Google Sheets isn’t limited to 26 rows, 26 columns, or 26 worksheets. Idk what GP was talking about. It’s certainly limited but not to that extent
Could be. I mean the lettered ones, from A to Z.
Those are columns. Rows are numbered.
Google docs is far worse than office, in every way except for collaboration. It does not destroy them at all. LibreOffice is on par except for having no collaboration, but is not widely used so definitely haven’t destroyed them. Office is still very successful and probably won’t be gone anytime soon
Office is still very successful and probably won’t be gone anytime soon
Unfortunately for almost the entirety of the corporate world and govt bureaucracy.
Fair enough, I stand corrected.
I believe proton isn’t emulating but rather is a direct instruction layer. I’m ootl for close to a decade plus, but the commonly cited number was you need hardware 7x the power of original equipment to properly emulate.
Yes… I actually cannot fathom just how incessantly bad a company can manage to be, and how some people still refuse to realise how there’s literally nothing of value to be had from anything made by Microsoft.
Proton (and Wine, what it’s based on) are not emulators. They are compatibility layers, it translates Windows system calls to native Linux system calls.
Or simply put: Wine Is Not an Emulator
That isn’t “simply put”. It’s a witty way to phrase half the comment, completely omitting the other half that actually explains what it does. WINE is a clever abbreviation as a name for the tool, but the opposite of descriptive about its purpose or function.
WNE?
Ah, WINAE.
“Wine Is No Emulator” works ;)
So what do we use now?
I just wrote a tiny bit of code, a cute little GLSL shader than generates some shapes in a Voxel modeling tool I like. Would love to share it. Most of the shaders I use were found on GitHub. I was going to use GitLab but then realized it was like a second life bar of the same GitBoss.
I have no idea where to host my little scripts now.
Codeberg
Codeberg or Sourcehut got you covered 🙂
Unless you want private repos and free CI, which are a pretty huge benefit of Github. I haven’t personally seen any issues with Github despite all the moaning about uptime, and I use it a fair bit. I think it’s going to take a lot more for them to become another SourceForge. Like, if they introduce banner ads for example.
Now that’s just misinformation you’re spreading. Codeberg lets you have both private repositories and free CI (even via two different tools, Woodpecker and Forgejo Actions. None of it is unlimited, and that is just fair. Just throw a few bucks their way to support their infrastructure cost as opposed to being Microsoft’s product by using their “free” stuff.
Thank you kind people. My codeberg is up.
Now I need to learn how to actually use git. Being a noob is a full time job…
The fact that it can’t even get PowerShell right when it should be intimately familiar with PowerShell commands and scripts is absolutely asinine.
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Being the first mover doesn’t guarantee shit and never has.
Fucking linux nerds (that was for someone I just met on here). Anyway, yea, my company got three licenses for it, biggest waste of budget ever. I dunno what they clamped on top of open AI, but it’s just terrible. It can’t even parse a spreadsheet correctly.
