Worrying in public seems to be the theme of the day for me. Just published “Writing when tech has broken the web’s social contract”
@baldur Well ranted. From my POV as the worst programmer in the world, though, Office 365 is worse than AI. When I click a button that did one thing on Friday, but does something else on Monday, my spreadsheets get errors in them that can be very hard to detect.
@baldur Depressing but accurate, near as I can tell. Every time I use Alexa, I want to throw the thing across the room, because spamming me with Amazon product advertisements clearly is more important than writing software that works as a digital assistant. It's more of a digital pest.
Your comments on Microsoft are especially depressing, since I support Teams and M365 in a large university medical center. In that space, I primarily support Zoom, but my team (Collaboration) now supports Teams as well, along with Outlook issues that take longer to debug than our server or desktop teams have patience to deal with. The multiplicity of versions with their associated bugs mean the most common bit of advice I give is, delete it and recreate it.
@baldur A fantastic article! I share your very critical view of AI and enjoyed your libertarian characterisation of various tech leaders.
Also, I think it’s important that you (and we all) continue writing, and that we also publicly make a point that we wrote our stuff without using or being influenced by AI. Although the Web is technology, through and through, it is and should continue to be a place for humans.