Microsoft: It’s not Your Computer

God, please let them create an option button to stop this

Either Microsoft changed something automatically with the way I log into the Azure portal, or #CorporateIT tried to fix something I complained about without telling me, but either way, I’m trapped in a loop of confirming I’ve done the thing I’m supposed to do. So I go to clear cookies, and I’m treated to not one, but two different messages informing me — as if I didn’t already know — that I don’t own this computer.

I get the concept

I see these messages in the browser, in every Office app, in OneDrive, and in the Windows settings. I get it. I got it. I’m good. Thank you for the continual reminder that literally every single keystroke, sound I make, image the camera can see, file I look at, email I send, web site I use, and everything else I’m tired of typing into this list is logged and reviewed by people who can somehow not go insane by looking at reports like this from 80,000 users. (If there were a use for AI to get its feet wet, this would surely be it.)

You may think I’m exaggerating, but many years ago, I got caught up in a kerfluffle with IT, and literally had someone look me dead in the eye and tell me that he reviewed every single file that got transferred to or from a USB drive connected to a computer. He said this as if I were supposed to be scared; like he was looking for a reaction that I should be worried. I just told him, “I know,” and moved on. This wasn’t something that was being advertised, but I easily inferred it by everything else going on in the way the company approaches IT. It seemed like he didn’t know how to process that.

This Right Here. This is the Problem.

Tangentially, I think this is why the Microsoft phone died. Microsoft lives and breathes by the average Fortune 500 IT manager — let that sink in — and of course people who bought a Windows phone wanted to connect it to their corporate email. When they tried, they got scary messages that the company could see everything they did with their phone, and remotely wipe it on a whim. I expect most (like me on my iPhone) backed out of the process, and then asked themselves what the advantage was of a Windows phone over others. For decades, it’s become routine for companies to make sudden, sweeping personnel changes, and who wants to wake up to a wiped phone because your company missed its projections for a second quarter in a row? I’m sure they’re only eliminating the people who had something to do with that, right? Right?

Our electronics our very, very personal. This is why people mostly choose Apple products when spending their own money. There is much more “telemetry” going on with Apple products than I would like, and they keep making moves to transform macOS into the same sort of walled garden that iOS is, but Apple is at least presenting an overall message that your stuff is your stuff, and they seem to making the right moves to ensure that. Time will tell, I guess.

Almost everyone has to use Windows at their job. Every company with a fleet of Windows computers is doing these sorts of things, because some upper manager hired some top-4 consulting company who told them they had to, and now everyone distrusts their company and Microsoft. That shows up on the bottom line.

Microsoft has a glorious opportunity to create a new version of Windows for personal use that flips the script. A version where there’s no telemetry and no artificial restrictions on hardware. Instead, they’re quintupling down on their user-last philosophy, and trying this. (Again.) The Windows terminal computer, with no local storage. It’s just a KVM to a Windows image running in their cloud. There will be — there cannot be — any hardware upgrades or gaming or piracy or anything else interesting. And for what? What’s the upside for the user? They still have a “computer” on their desk. What are they getting for the tradeoff? Who would want this?

Not this crap again

I’m betting that part of this introduction is a whole fleet of “AI-enhanced” tracking of literally everything going on with the “computer,” so that IT departments can “simplify” this critically-necessary piece of “infrastructure” in their “security” posture, and I’d bet key people in my IT department are touching themselves thinking about foisting it on everyone who doesn’t have to have some sort of engineering or development tool.

Insights into Stack Overflow’s traffic – Stack Overflow

Source: Insights into Stack Overflow’s traffic – Stack Overflow

Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen inaccurate data and graphs circulating on social media channels regarding Stack Overflow’s traffic. We wanted to take the opportunity to provide additional context and information on the origin of that data, the traffic trends we are seeing, and the work we’re doing to ensure Stack Overflow remains a go-to destination for developers and technologists for years to come.

They are responding to this graph, which I saw this on some aggregate social media site.

First, ChatGPT couldn’t have started making a difference at this time. It, along with other LLM’s, hasn’t really become useful till this year.

Second, it couldn’t have made that much of a difference that fast. Nothing does.

Third, who would take this graph out of context and overlay this trend line and blame it on ChatGPT? What’s the thinking? Who benefits? Was it for the lulz? Was it to drive mindshare about what “AI” is supposedly doing “for us?” “To” programming? Why has it been pushed in front of so many people that StackOverflow feels the need to set the record straight?

Reddit is a Psyop

I can’t confirm one way or another that this actually happened, and I’m not going to even try. It is instructive that there is no doubt it could be true, and I’ll leave it at that.

This is yet another reminder that Reddit is a corporate-fronted deep-state psyop propaganda machine designed to manipulate a very, very specific demographic.

“Can Everyone See My Screen?”

“YES! EVERYONE CAN SEE YOUR SCREEN. THAT’S LITERALLY THE WHOLE POINT OF THIS STUPID SOFTWARE.”

If you can ask if your screen can be seen, and you reasonably expect to be able to hear someone respond to that query, you should know without a shadow of a doubt that everyone can see your screen, which inevitably is showing some stupid PowerPoint slide that we call could have done without anyway.

So it turns out that there are, in fact, stupid questions.

When I’m president, I will make it illegal to ask, “Can everyone see my screen?” in online meetings.

I expect to be swept into office on a “purple wave” with no other policy positions.

The Hell that is OneDrive

My PC — the PC I bought for precisely one game — came with Windows 11 pre-installed. Now, I hate Windows, and I expect it doesn’t like me much either, and that’s fine. For the sake of a game or two, I can live with it. One of the more annoying things I’ve found with Windows is their implementation of cloud storage, with their OneDrive.

I decided to make the effort to “break it” so that everything would just live on my local hard drive, and it made a dog’s breakfast out of the folder structure. It was only after this that it was revealed that folders like “Documents” actually live under a folder hierarchy with “OneDrive” in the path, and I don’t want to try to clean it up for fear of losing files. I don’t have anything worth keeping except the mods for ESO, but it would be a shame to lose them if Microsoft decided to lose its mind here.

First, I’ll admit that there is something to keep straight on Mac’s with iCloud storage enabled. On my MBP, I have this:

There are two locations for “Documents”, but one is “Documents – Local” and one is “Documents – iCloud.”

On my corporate Windows laptop, I have this:

I have two sets of folders mixed into the same namespace. I have no idea which is which. I have multiple links to Desktop’s and OneDrive’s.

Even worse, in the larger folder pane, EVERYTHING listed here is under ANOTHER “Desktop” folder, and ANOTHER “OneDrive” sits at the same level of “My Computer.”

How is anyone supposed to navigate this? How is anyone supposed to find anything? Windows search has NEVER worked. EVER. What were they — what was anyone — thinking!? This is madness.

UPDATE: I spent an hour and cleaned this mess up — only to have it get re-messed-up when I logged into another computer, of course. And now that I deleted the extraneous folders and duplicates, the script that did this — which is still running every time we start the computer — is throwing an error. So I got that going for me.

Get Me Out Of Data Hell — Ludicity

The Pain Zone… is an enterprise data warehouse platform. At the small scale we operate at, with little loss of detail, a data warehouse platform simply means that we copy a bunch of text files from different systems into a single place every morning.

The word enterprise means that we do this in a way that makes people say “Dear God, why would anyone ever design it that way?”, “But that doesn’t even help with security” and “Everyone involved should be fired for the sake of all that is holy and pure.”

For example, the architecture diagram which describes how we copy text files to our storage location has one hundred and four separate operations on it. When I went to count this, I was expecting to write forty and that was meant to illustrate my point. Instead, I ended up counting them up three times because there was no way it could be over a hundred. This whole thing should have ten operations in it.

…

Almost every large business in Melbourne is rushing to purchase our tooling, tools like Snowflake and Databricks, because the industry is pretending that any of this is more important than hiring competent people and treating them well. I could build something superior to this with an ancient laptop, an internet connection, and spreadsheets. It would take me a month tops.

I’ve known for a long time that I can’t change things here. But in this moment, I realize that the organization values things that I don’t value, and it’s as simple as that. I could pretend to be neutral and say that my values aren’t better, but you know what, my values are better.

PS:

… I gave a webinar to US board members at the invitation of the Financial Times. Suffice it to say that while people are sincerely trying their best, our leaders are not even remotely equipped to handle the volume of people just outright lying to them about IT.

Source: Get Me Out Of Data Hell — Ludicity

(Emphasis mine.)

That last part is really the kicker. Every middle manager in all the various IT organizational structures inside of a Fortune-sized public company are lying about things, whether by omission or by fact. They’re lying about what it is they do. They’re lying about their problems. They’re lying about their capabilities. They’re lying about their timelines.

They’re lying to people who are either don’t care, or aren’t equipped to understand how the things they’re being told are lies, even if they do care. They’re lying to build “kingdoms” in the company by justifying more people, more machines, and more software than is required to solve a problem. And not just by a little; by orders of magnitude.

Recently, it took me seven weeks of emails eventually involving fifty-odd people to get something done that took literally 30 seconds to do. Part of it was because I didn’t understand what I was asking for. I was asking for the wrong thing. Part of that is because the system is stupid, and no right-thinking person would have implemented it that way. Someone, somewhere, a long time ago (who probably left the company now) decided that this is how it should work, because someone at a consultancy told them that this is what “everyone” does.

I was asking for the logical, straightforward thing that would have fixed my issue, now and in the future. After it became clear that this would never happen, the 50+ “subject matter experts” involved had dozens of chances to respond and explain how what I was asking for actually worked, and clarified that I was asking for the wrong thing. But that didn’t happen.

Why? Because explaining why it works the way it does in front of God and everyone would reveal how idiotic it is. This can’t even be admitted over voice, but after several Zoom calls, you eventually see the pattern. It’s like the old magic eye pics in the 90’s. Eventually, you get your focus depth correct, and see the real picture. The image that no one else sees. They’re not paid to, so they don’t care.

Not only is the process stupid, the “self-help” web site that’s supposed to allow people to address this problem themselves is opaque, and doesn’t explain what’s going on. It masks the issue that I was having, when it would be very easy to show. This is a recurring pattern. Various IT functions have implemented “self-help” web sites that simply do not work, for reasons they are completely blind to because they never use them. They could make two small changes to this page, and it really would (mostly) address this stupid, broken policy. After all this wasted effort, someone involved seemed to finally understand my confusion and understand how this could be fixed, but I’ll bet they never do it.

Unless senior management — and I mean the guys right under the officers, because the officers are never going to care, and the upper-middle guys don’t have the political clout to do it — unless they are curious, concerned, and knowledgeable enough to ask illuminating questions to pierce the veil, the lies will go unchallenged, and the technical debt will continue to grow with every new project, and every project that is introduced to fix one that just failed.

At some point, when your personal sensibilities and the demonstrated collective priorities of the organization repeatedly come into conflict, you have to make a decision if you’re in the right place. For instance, I currently have personal issues which make the “switching costs” prohibitive, but this is an extremely individualistic equation to balance.

Election Malfeasance 2024

Here’s a guy who filmed Indiana Department of Transportation workers for a half hour removing Trump signs, and (allegedly) leaving the Harris ones. It’s just one data point among many. Over the past week, my Twitter feed has become FILLED with stories of crazy election problems already. And it’s not just one or two crazy, hard-right, loud-mouthed accounts. It’s many different people, and from all the battleground states.

Strangely, every story seems to only favor one side. Now, maybe that’s just my algorithm’s bias, so if anyone has stories FROM THE LEFT about, oh, I don’t know, a person voting in elections where the person said they never voted, or many dozens of voting “residences” for a single person, I’d actually love to hear about them. These would be headline news in the mainstream media, and I’m not seeing them.

Turns out that there are many, many ways to cheat our elections. It’s not just about hacking the voting machines, though, as a “computer guy,” this is the biggest issue of all, and it’s already been proven times! No, the “beauty” of this situation is that you can hide cheating at many different levels, in many different ways, and in many different regions, as needed.

Because of the issues last time — I mean, boarding up windows so observers couldn’t see!? — finding thousands of votes all for one person in the dead of the night!? — people are watching very carefully this time around, and it’s becoming more and more clear every day that our elections are susceptible to all sorts of shenanigans, and are in danger of being a disgraceful joke.

UPDATE: I sent this to a friend who works for INDOT. He sent it up the chain, and was told, yes, it was real, and that the Commissioner was already involved. Although crews are supposed to remove such temporary signs in easements to work — and whether or not they were, in fact, being selective about it — the optics from this are apparently bad enough that they have been told to leave all political signs alone until after the election.

Musk’s X blocked links to JD Vance dossier after hearing from Trump campaign – Ars Technica

According to Klippenstein, Musk sent a message in which he said, “I’ve asked X Safety to unsuspend him, even though I think he is an awful human being… Important to stay true to free speech principles.”

Source: Musk’s X blocked links to JD Vance dossier after hearing from Trump campaign – Ars Technica

Klippenstein revealed Vance’s social security number in an opposition “dossier” he posted to Twitter. He was suspended. He redacted the personal information, and was reinstated.

Saved you a click, and talk about burying the lede!

Boo, Ars. Boo!

Societal Reprogramming

You Are Being Warned

People are starting to wake up. This notice needs to be expanded to include all printed media, broadcast, movies, streaming, video gaming, and even tabletop role playing. The billionaires in question are at the top of companies like Blackrock, State Street, and Vanguard, which collectively own a controlling stake in almost every single company in the US. Larry Fink has become the poster child of this effort, because he literally said the quiet part out loud.

The next time you wonder why your favorite entertainment started being terrible all of a sudden, realize that these investment companies directed that to happen, and they’ve got more money than God to lose on spreading their messaging. It has become a complete top-down reprogramming of society. The only major platform/channel standing apart from this is Twitter, and that’s why they hate Elon Musk.