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I would guess they realized they missed a notification or warning and feel a bit bad about the whole thing blowing up. Hopefully not though. The fact there were several high profile projects that got caught off guard puts the blame mostly on MS IMO.

I think the reason these things go viral is that a ton of people reading about them can see themselves in the same situation, minus the clout needed to get it resolved. A short term PR crisis is the best we can get, so everyone piles on.

I don't think MS will fix it though. IMO, they're more likely to create a program for open source code signing. That way they can capture all the high visibility projects, get a bunch of goodwill for being philanthropic, and all the small projects that don't qualify are too small to cause a fuss, so they can continue to treat them poorly.


> "We worked hard to make sure partners understood this was coming, from emails, banners, reminders," said Davuluri.

Emails are useless given the volume of trivial crap that MS emails about. Banners don't help for systems on auto-pilot. Reminders how?

Break my workflow and let me un-break it when I notice.


I hope you're right. I played around with a bunch of AI stuff recently and that's kind of the conclusion I came to. Use local AI for mission critical stuff, if you're confident in that, and use the SOTA models for reviewing.

Tap the latest general knowledge for asking "could this be improved", but make the improvements with local systems and models. But then the obvious problem becomes finding new data to train the AIs. In my opinion, there's no way their plan doesn't involve stealing from everyone to keep training, so is it really going to be safe to use the cutting edge models at all?


> Whats next?

I think Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. are happy with the collateral damage caused by false positives and bad product decisions. And the way they implemented this was a bad product decision.

Think about it. If they "accidentally" destroy distribution for small projects that don't have the visibility to make waves, that's fewer possible startups that can eat their lunch. The cynic in me thinks that "at scale", "AI false positives", etc. are just an excuse for them to eliminate small developers.

They don't have to ban them all either. All they have to do is increase the risk to the point where rational people won't take the risk.

There were people that warned not to get into iOS development because it was impossible to guarantee distribution of an app. How do you build things like LoB apps under those circumstances? And who benefits when it's impossible to promise delivery of custom built apps? It favors big companies with the visibility to short circuit the system.

It's asymmetric rules; one set for big companies and another for small developers. I really hope the renewed interest in Linux takes off because it's the last chance we have at holding off big tech from taking over every little aspect of our lives.


It could be dead simple. Lock the account, but let the owner temporarily unlock it for X days so they have enough time to undergo verification.

If they manage to build good memory systems, people will stop keeping personal docs and rely on the “AI” for everything. Imagine 20 years from now when people don’t even have copies of the recipe to bake bread and then you’ll see what the goal is.

And then in future if you try to build something to reverse the situation your coding llm becomes stupid and your psychologist llm recommends you some blue pills.

Software distribution is largely controlled by 3 companies; Microsoft, Google, and Apple. We used to have the web and web apps as an escape hatch, but, surprise, all 3 of those companies use a shared “safe” browsing blacklist that can be used to wipe your domain / website out of existence. Mozilla participates by using the same list which is a shame.

Big tech shouldn’t be allowed to control the platforms and the ability to distribute / blacklist software and sites. That needs to be legislated against and those companies need to be broken into a thousand pieces each.


Agreed.

The strong gatekeeping, the encouragement of vital dependency (i.e. treating user/customer data, email, content as if it were the company's, even to the point of cutting access without recourse), the dark pattern upsells, unpermissioned or dark permissioned surveillance, manipulation, the hosting of pervasive scam ads (even Apple News is full of scam ads), ...

None of this should be acceptable. All these ethical violations degrade the lives of countless individuals in the name of "freedom" for corporations.

Conflicts of interest and anticompetitiveness should not be "free" in either sense of the word.


> I think the number of people opposing the construction would increase when they release its half the county.

What's the math on that?

It's interesting to see the US mandate ethanol production the way they do, which could be argued to be a farm subsidy, and then balk at the land needed for solar installations.


For arguments made in good faith- I think it's humanity's inability to comprehend scale. We can't get the volume of a glass of water right if we change it from tall to wide. Why would we think that terrawatts worth of PV would be a square shorter on a side than most people's daily commute?

It's not a If/Or Question. Agrisolar is even beneficial to farmers

“Action Required” followed by the shittiest, least detailed, most ambiguous instructions on the planet is a Microslop staple. It’s exhilarating to get a couple of them in the same week.

The ones that tell you there’s a problem with your MS365 subscription, but don’t tell you which one are an especially exciting challenge to deal with. Bonus points if they warn about “possible data deletion” without specifying what.


> The ones that tell you there’s a problem with your MS365 subscription, but don’t tell you which one are an especially exciting challenge to deal with. Bonus points if they warn about “possible data deletion” without specifying what.

These are real? I get these in my spam box all the time and they have all the hallmarks of a phishing scam, urgency combined with vague description with no verifiable details that aren't gleaned from my email address itself.


I get those too, and I don’t even have any Microsoft accounts. So I assume at least some of them are not real. ;)

$300 / year for a code signing cert that won’t pass Smartscreen Filter is wild.

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