We use all the Microsoft programs at work - Teams and Outlook especially.

After all kinds of technical problems with Teams, that sometimes go unresolved for over a year, Microsoft shifted their priorities away from fixing things and towards adding an annoying AI Copilot button, that just takes up space and all it does, is loads the website in Teams, so I disabled it. Soon they just add it back, but in a different row of icons, therefore it’s now a different button, you have to disable (I think they added yet another one, to the Teams, on my work phone and I had to disabled that too). Not too long after, the desktop one just enabled itself, because of “an error” and I can disable it, but doing so activates a popup, that begs you to turn it back on, every once in a while. You can’t disable the popup and can only click “Yes” or “Not now” on it. I still keep it disabled, out of principle, but yesterday I noticed yet another Copilot button, this time in the top right corner of my Outlook and this one cannot be disabled, on the business version of Outlook and even on the personal one, it’s only possible to do it through hidden privacy settings, by prohibiting the program from connecting to Microsoft servers, for extra “features”.

There’s people complaining about it online, so it’s clear nobody really wants it, but at this point Microsofts position is that you will have at least one useless AI button on your screen, at any given time, and you will be happy. And yes, their AI sucks and if I absolutely have to use AI for something, there’s already 2 better options, we have access to, at work.

For context, this is a funny
Interaction between an engineer and copilot on Microsoft’s core programming Language 🤣🤯

@prologic@twtxt.net right. I wonder what prompted the measure. Perhaps Microsoft doesn’t want any scrapper but Copilot to be lurking around? That might even sound as anti-competitive. I wonder how long will it take for lawsuits to kick in.

Not sure that I really like where Microsoft is taking VSCode - it looks like soon it will be just another frontend for them to sell Github Copilot subscriptions.

🤔 👋 Reconsidering moving Yarn.social’s development back to Github: Speaking of which (I do not forget); @fastidious@arrakis.netbros.com and I were discussing over a video call two nights ago, as well as @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org who joined a bit later, about the the whole moved of all of my projects and their source code off of Github. Whilst some folks do understand and appreciate my utter disgust over what Microsoft and Copilot did by blatantly scraping open source software’s codebases without even so much as any attempt at attribution or respecting the licenes of many (if not all?) open source projects.

That being said however, @fastidious@arrakis.netbros.com makes a very good and valid argument for putting Yarn.social’s codebases, repositories and issues back on Github for reasons that make me “torn” over my own sense of morality and ethics.

But I can live with this as long as I continue to run and operate my new (yet to be off the ground) company “Self Hosted Pty Ltd” and where it operates it’s own code hosting, servicesa, tools, etc.

Plese comment here on your thoughts. Let us decide togetehr 🤗

#yarnsocial #github #opsnsource #copilot #microsoft

Move your code. Copilot is just one more reason. I maintain an account to work with other projects, but won’t host my stuff there.