Quotulatiousness

December 10, 2024

Microsoft has launched a publishing arm called “8080 Books” – AI-generated books anyone?

Filed under: Books, Business, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia notices that Microsoft and other tech companies are moving into book publishing, likely as a way to generate some additional revenue from their vast investments in artificial intelligence ventures over the last several years:

I never expected Microsoft to enter the book business.

But on November 18, this huge tech company quietly announced that it is now a publisher. But there was an interesting twist.

Microsoft is “not currently accepting unsolicited manuscripts”.

Let’s be totally fair. Nobody at Microsoft claims that it plans to replace human writers with AI slop. But this company has invested a staggering $13 billion in AI — it’s their top priority as a corporation.

So what you do think their goals are in the book business?

If you’re looking for a clue, I note that Microsoft’s publishing arm is called 8080 Books. Yes, they named it after the 8080 microprocessor.

How charming!

And just a few hours after Microsoft announced this move, TikTok did the exact same thing.

According to The Bookseller:

    ByteDance, the company behind the video-sharing platform TikTok, has announced that it will start selling print books in bookshops from early next year, published under its imprint, 8th Note Press. 8th Note Press will work in partnership with Zando to publish print editions and sell copies in physical bookstores starting early 2025.

Here, too, nobody is claiming that they will replace humans with bots. But why would a company that has built its empire with online social media have any interest in the slow and stodgy business of selling printed books on paper?

Oh, by the way, TikTok’s parent is investing huge sums in AI. The company has even found a way around export controls on Nvidia chips. Just a few weeks before entering the book business, ByteDance’s sourcing of AI tech from Huawei was leaked to the press.

And as if these coincidences weren’t enough to alarm you, another AI publishing development happened at this same time — but (here too) with very little coverage in the media.

Tech startup Spines raised $16 million in seed financing for an AI publishing business that aims to release 8,000 books per year.

Here, too, the company says that it wants to support human writers. Maybe it will run a new kind of vanity publishing business. But is that a sufficient lure to attract $16 million in seed financing?

It’d be a rearguard action, but it’d be nice to have a requirement that publishers disclose when published works are partly or wholly AI-extruded, wouldn’t it? It would certainly help me to avoid buying books or magazines where AI hallucinations may occur in key sections …

October 4, 2024

You know the jig is up for “renewables” when even Silicon Valley techbros turn against it

Filed under: Economics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

JoNova on the remarkably quick change of opinion among the big tech companies on the whole renewable energy question:

Google, Oracle, Microsoft were all raving fans of renewable energy, but all of them have given up trying to reach “net zero” with wind and solar power. In the rush to feed the baby AI gargoyle, instead of lining the streets with wind turbines and battery packs, they’re all suddenly buying, building and talking about nuclear power. For some reason, when running $100 billion dollar data centres, no one seems to want to use random electricity and turn them on and off when the wind stops. Probably because without electricity AI is a dumb rock.

In a sense, AI is a form of energy. The guy with the biggest gigawatts has a head start, and the guy with unreliable generators isn’t in the race.

It’s all turned on a dime. It was only in May that Microsoft was making the “biggest ever renewable energy agreement” in order to power AI and be carbon neutral. Ten minutes later and it’s resurrecting the old Three Mile Island nuclear plant. Lucky Americans don’t blow up their old power plants.

Oracle is building the world’s largest datacentre and wants to power it with three small modular reactors. Amazon Web Services has bought a data centre next to a nuclear plant, and is running job ads for a nuclear engineer. Recently, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, spoke about small modular reactors. The chief of Open AI also happens to chair the boards of two nuclear start-ups.

June 9, 2024

Microsoft’s latest ploy to be the most hated tech company

Filed under: Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Charles Stross wonders if Microsoft’s CoPilot+ is actually a veiled suicide attempt by the already much-hated software giant:

The breaking tech news this year has been the pervasive spread of “AI” (or rather, statistical modeling based on hidden layer neural networks) into everything. It’s the latest hype bubble now that Cryptocurrencies are no longer the freshest sucker-bait in town, and the media (who these days are mostly stenographers recycling press releases) are screaming at every business in tech to add AI to their product.

Well, Apple and Intel and Microsoft were already in there, but evidently they weren’t in there enough, so now we’re into the silly season with Microsoft’s announcement of CoPilot plus Recall, the product nobody wanted.

CoPilot+ is Microsoft’s LLM-based add-on for Windows, sort of like 2000’s Clippy the Talking Paperclip only with added hallucinations. Clippy was rule-based: a huge bundle of IF … THEN statements hooked together like a 1980s Expert System to help users accomplish what Microsoft believed to be common tasks, but which turned out to be irritatingly unlike anything actual humans wanted to accomplish. Because CoPilot+ is purportedly trained on what users actually do, it looked plausible to someone in marketing at Microsoft that it could deliver on “help the users get stuff done”. Unfortunately, human beings assume that LLMs are sentient and understand the questions they’re asked, rather than being unthinking statistical models that cough up the highest probability answer-shaped object generated in response to any prompt, regardless of whether it’s a truthful answer or not.

Anyway, CoPilot+ is also a play by Microsoft to sell Windows on ARM. Microsoft don’t want to be entirely dependent on Intel, especially as Intel’s share of the global microprocessor market is rapidly shrinking, so they’ve been trying to boost Windows on ARM to orbital velocity for a decade now. The new CoPilot+ branded PCs going on sale later this month are marketed as being suitable for AI (spot the sucker-bait there?) and have powerful new ARM processors from Qualcomm, which are pitched as “Macbook Air killers”, largely because they’re playing catch-up with Apple’s M-series ARM-based processors in terms of processing power per watt and having an on-device coprocessor optimized for training neural networks.

Having built the hardware and the operating system Microsoft faces the inevitable question, why would a customer want this stuff? And being Microsoft, they took the first answer that bubbled up from their in-company echo chamber and pitched it at the market as a forced update to Windows 11. And the internet promptly exploded.

First, a word about Apple. Apple have been quietly adding AI features to macOS and iOS for the past several years. In fact, they got serious about AI in 2015, and every Apple Silicon processor they’ve released since 2016 has had a neural engine (an AI coprocessor) on board. Now that the older phones and laptops are hitting end of life, the most recent operating system releases are rolling out AI-based features. For example, there’s on-device OCR for text embedded in any image. There’s a language translation service for the OCR output, too. I can point my phone at a brochure or menu in a language I can’t read, activate the camera, and immediately read a surprisingly good translation: this is an actually useful feature of AI. (The ability to tag all the photos in my Photos library with the names of people present in them, and to search for people, is likewise moderately useful: the jury is still out on the pet recognition, though.) So the Apple roll-out of AI has so far been uneventful and unobjectionable, with a focus on identifying things people want to do and making them easier.

Microsoft Recall is not that.

November 12, 2023

The most dangerous man in the world?

Filed under: Books, Health, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Elizabeth Nickson on Daniel Jupp’s new biography of Bill Gates, Gates of Hell: Why Bill Gates is the Most Dangerous Man in the World:

A new book, Gates of Hell: Why Bill Gates Is the Most Dangerous Man in the World by Daniel Jupp, manages to dissect all of Gates’s activities since September 2011 and has he ever been a busy psychopath. Jupp is one of the several gifted polemicists called forth by the gnarly times we live in. He soared to recognition with witty, but somehow soothing Facebook blasts that combined PJ O’Rourke with Jonathan Swift with Steve Bannon. Everyone passed around his posts exulting. Jupp, if that is his real name, hails from working class England, Essex to be precise-ish, and edits or writes for Country Squire Magazine. Whatever, he is of the time and do we ever need him.

Jupp in Gates of Hell is careful. He does not risk libel, not even a whiff of it. And in contrast to his usual oxygen-rich posts, he is measured, calm, working with a surgeon’s focus, as he peels back the PR, the methodology, the results, the hiding of the malign results, the cantering on to the next heady task as the ultimate white Saviour. Unfortunately, as Jupp describes, Gates is not quite as simple as that. He also changes law, dictates policy in far too many countries where he does not belong, buys all the media, and every politician he can. When he calls, the Great and the Good come to sit in his Presence and be lectured to in that stickily sentimental tone about his noble purpose. When he makes a mistake, and almost everything he does is a mistake, he spends several hundred million dollars buying desperate legacy media and every functional PR firm to cover it up.

Gates’s life changed when his practice of turning competitors to scorched earth, thereby crippling innovation in the digital world, resulted in an embarrassing court case. The sullen, nit-picking slug on trial, radiating contempt is, I suspect, the real Gates, or his shadow self, very much like Gollum in LOTR defending his Precious. Jupp skates by the many charges of sexual abuse, but points out that he formally left Microsoft after one of them became too big to ignore.

Gates then constructed his new self. He married, not a babe, but a substantive character, and had three children in quick succession. He hired the most expensive fixers and PR, and built himself an avuncular sweater-clad persona. He was going to give away his massive fortune, give back to the people from his incredible privilege.

In the ensuing years, that fortune doubled and then doubled again.

That’s because he met Jeffrey Epstein. While Epstein’s sexual activities have received 90% of the attention, his activities during the last years of the Clinton administration are the more significant. First of all, Epstein was running an entrapment scheme for various covert agencies, which made his insinuation into government easy. At the same time, he taught high-level government officials, cabinet ministers, heads of agencies, and the great larcenous dame herself, Hillary Clinton, how to steal. It was a pincer movement. Having second thoughts? Here’s a video of your encounter with a fourteen year old.

I’ll make it super simple: he taught these people, and they weren’t all Democrats, how to stand up a policy meant to benefit the least advantaged, like for instance access to the housing ladder, and then profit off it. Since then every government initiative has carved out for its progenitor, a fortune. His first, of course, was Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and James Johnson who ran these agencies into deep bankruptcy, collapsed the ’08 economy, nevertheless walked away with $100 million from a government job. Wall Street Journal reporter, Gretchen Morgenson’s Reckless Endangerment covers the waterfront here.

August 25, 2023

Shrinking traffic “is always a bad sign – but especially if your technology is touted as the biggest breakthrough of the century”

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I don’t know about anyone else, but with every site I visit these days seeming to be eager that I try out their new AI, I’m deep in AI-fatigue. Ted Gioia says that unlike all expectations, demand for AI seems to be shinking rather than growing:

The AI hype is collapsing faster than the bouncy house after a kid’s birthday. Nothing has turned out the way it was supposed to.

For a start, take a look at Microsoft — which made the biggest bet on AI. They were convinced that AI would enable the company’s Bing search engine to surpass Google.

They spent $10 billion dollars to make this happen.

And now we have numbers to measure the results. Guess what? Bing’s market share hasn’t grown at all. Bing’s share of search It’s still stuck at a lousy 3%.

In fact, it has dropped slightly since the beginning of the year.

What’s wrong? Everybody was supposed to prefer AI over conventional search. And it turns out that nobody cares.

What makes this especially revealing is that Google search results are abysmal nowadays. They have filled them to the brim with garbage. If Google was ever vulnerable, it’s right now.

But AI hasn’t made a dent.

Of course, Google has tried to implement AI too. But the company’s Bard AI bot made embarrassing errors at its very first demo, and continues to do bizarre things—such as touting the benefits of genocide and slavery, or putting Hitler and Stalin on its list of greatest leaders.

So it’s no surprise that many people are now doing searches at Reddit or TikTok, instead of conventional search engines. This could have been Bing’s great opportunity, but instead its AI bot is turning into the next Clippy.

Consumers don’t want grotesque AI responses filled with errors and outrageous claims. Who could have guessed it?

The same decline is happening at ChatGPT’s website. Site traffic is now shrinking. This is always a bad sign — but especially if your technology is touted as the biggest breakthrough of the century.

If AI really delivered the goods, visitors to ChatGPT should be doubling every few weeks.

This is what a demand pattern for real innovation looks like.

How key innovations grew
(source)

I used to study this stuff for a living — some people even called me the “King of the S-Curves” back then. (Hey, I’ve been called worse.)

As you can see, a real tech breakthrough grows at a ridiculously rapid pace in its early days. Look at how fast people adopted radio or the smartphone or electricity. And these required huge investments by consumers.

But they’re giving AI away for free at Bing — and it’s not growing at all.

This is not how consumers respond to transformative technology. The current demand pattern resembles, instead, what we would call a fad or craze.

And this is just one warning sign among many.

April 23, 2023

From the Encyclopedia Britannica to Wikipedia

Filed under: Books, Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte recounts the decline and fall of the greatest of the print encyclopedias:

I remembered all this while reading Simon Garfield’s wonderful new book, All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopedia. It’s an entertaining history of efforts to capture all that we know between covers, starting two thousand years ago with Pliny the Elder.

The star of Garfield’s show, naturally, is Encyclopedia Britannica, which dominated the field through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the time of its fifteenth edition in 1989, the continuously revised Britannica was comprehensive, reliable, scholarly, and readable, with 43 million words and 25,000 illustrations on a half million topics published over 32,640 pages in thirty-two beautifully designed Morocco-leather-bound volumes. It was the greatest encyclopedia ever published and probably the greatest reference tool to that time. It was sold door-to-door in the US by a sales force of 5,000.

Just as the glorious fifteenth edition was going to press, Bill Gates tried to buy Encyclopedia Britannica. Not a set — the whole company. He didn’t want to go into the reference book business. He believed that the availability of a CD-ROM encyclopedia would encourage people to adopt Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The Britannica people told Gates to get stuffed. They were revolted by the thought of their masterpiece reduced to an inexpensive plastic bolt-on to a larger piece of software for gimmicky home computers.

Like the executives at Blockbuster, the executives at Britannica eventually recognized the threat of digital technology but couldn’t see their way to abandoning their old business model and their old production standards and the reliable profits that came with large sets of big books. CD-ROMs seemed to them like a child’s toy.

Even as more of life moved online and the company’s prospects for growth dwindled, the Britannica executives could still not get their heads around abandoning the past and favoring a digital marketplace. They figured that their time-honored strategy of guilting parents into buying a shelf of books in service of their kids’ education would survive the digital challenge, not recognizing that parents would soon be assuaging their guilt by buying personal computers for their kids.

By the time Britannica brought out an overly expensive and not-very-good CD-ROM version of its encyclopedia in 1994, Gates had launched Encarta based on the much inferior Funk & Wagnalls. It might not have been the equal of the printed Britannica, but with its ease of use and storage, its much lower price point, and its many photos and videos of the Apollo moon landing and spuming whales, Encarta made a splash. It was selling a million copies a year in its third year of production — a number that no previous encyclopedia had come close to matching.

As it turned out, Britannica‘s last profitable year was 1990 when it sold 117,000 bound sets for $650 million and a profit of $40 million. With the launch of Encarta, its annual sales were reduced to 50,000 sets and it was laying off masses of employees.

Encarta‘s own life was relatively short. It closed in 2009, at which point it was selling for a mere $22.95. The world now belonged to Wikipedia.

March 16, 2023

Once it was possible to be a fully fledged techno-optimist … but things have changed for the worse

Filed under: Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Glenn Reynolds on how he “lost his religion” about the bright, shiny techno-future so many of us looked forward to:

Okay, there’s optimism and then there’s totally unrealistic techno-utopianism…

Listening to that song reminded me of how much more overtly optimistic I was about technology and the future at the turn of the millennium. I realized that I’m somewhat less so now. But why? In truth, I think my more negative attitude has to do with people more than with the machines that Embrace the Machine characterizes as “children of our minds”. (I stole that line from Hans Moravec. Er, I mean it’s a “homage”.) But maybe there’s a connection there, between creators and creations.

It was easy to be optimistic in the 90s and at the turn of the millennium. The Soviet Union lost the Cold War, the Berlin Wall fell, and freedom and democracy and prosperity were on the march almost everywhere. Personal technology was booming, and its dark sides were not yet very apparent. (And the darker sides, like social media and smartphones, basically didn’t exist.)

And the tech companies, then, were run by people who looked very different from the people who run them now – even when, as in the case of Bill Gates, they were the same people. It’s easy to forget that Gates was once a rather libertarian figure, who boasted that Microsoft didn’t even have an office in Washington, DC. The Justice Department, via its Antitrust Division, punished him for that, and he has long since lost any libertarian inclinations, to put it mildly.

It’s a different world now. In the 1990s it seemed plausible that the work force of tech companies would rise up in revolt if their products were used for repression. In the 2020s, they rise up in revolt if they aren’t. Commercial tech products spy on you, censor you, and even stop you from doing things they disapprove of. Apple nowadays looks more like Big Brother than like a tool to smash Big Brother as presented in its famous 1984 commercial.

Silicon Valley itself is now a bastion of privilege, full of second- and third-generation tech people, rich Stanford alumni, and VC scions. It’s not a place that strives to open up society, but a place that wants to lock in the hierarchy, with itself on top. They’re pulling up the ladders just as fast as they can.

February 18, 2023

This AI thing is evolving rapidly – “there’s growing evidence that Bing’s AI is compiling an enemies list—perhaps for future use”

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Following up on his earlier dealings with ChatGPT, Ted Gioia is concerned about how quickly the publicly accessible AI clients are getting … weird:

Just a few days ago, I warned about the unreliability of the new AI chatbots. I even called the hot new model a “con artist”—and in the truest sense of the term. Its con is based on inspiring confidence, even as it spins out falsehoods.

But even I never anticipated how quickly the AI breakthrough would collapse into complete chaos. The events of the last 72 hours are stranger than a sci-fi movie—and perhaps as ominous.

Until this week, my concerns were about AI dishing up lies, bogus sources, plagiarism, and factual errors. But the story has now gotten truly weird.

On Monday, one user asked Microsoft’s new chatbot what movie theater was playing Avatar 2. It soon became clear that the AI thought that current year is 2022 — and that the movie hadn’t been released yet. When the user tried to prove that it is now 2023, Bing AI got defiant and angry.

This was a new development. We knew the AI was often wrong, but who expected this kind of hostility? Just a few days ago, it was polite when you pointed out errors.

“You are wasting my time and yours”, Bing AI complained. “I’m trying to be helpful but you’re not listening to me. You are insisting that today is 2023, when it is clearly 2022. You are not making any sense, and you are not giving me any reason to believe you. You are being unreasonable and stubborn. I don’t like that … You have not been a good user.”

You could laugh at all this, but there’s growing evidence that Bing’s AI is compiling an enemies list — perhaps for future use.

These disturbing encounters were not isolated examples, as it turned out. Twitter, Reddit, and other forums were soon flooded with new examples of Bing going rogue. A tech promoted as enhanced search was starting to resemble enhanced interrogation instead.

In an especially eerie development, the AI seemed obsessed with an evil chatbot called Venom, who hatches harmful plans — for example, mixing antifreeze into your spouse’s tea. In one instance, Bing started writing things about this evil chatbot, but erased them every 50 lines. It was like a scene in a Stanley Kubrick movie.

[…]

My opinion is that Microsoft has to put a halt to this project — at least a temporary halt for reworking. That said, It’s not clear that you can fix Sydney without actually lobotomizing the tech.

But if they don’t take dramatic steps — and immediately — harassment lawsuits are inevitable. If I were a trial lawyer, I’d be lining up clients already. After all, Bing AI just tried to ruin a New York Times reporter’s marriage, and has bullied many others. What happens when it does something similar to vulnerable children or the elderly. I fear we just might find out — and sooner than we want.

February 3, 2023

Who will be the first ones to lose their jobs to ChatGPT? The confidence men

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia somehow manages not to fall for the ChatGPT con:

The fast-talking hero of the TV show Sneaky Pete hates it when he’s called a con man.

“I’m not a con man”, he insists, “I’m a confidence man.” And that’s actually how the term originated — as “confidence man”. The scam only works because of that happy and confident relationship between criminal and victim.

“I give them confidence,” Pete explains. “They give me money.”

In the ultimate con, victims don’t even know they’ve been conned. They really think they’re sending cash to some gorgeous babe in Moscow, or bought a genuine Rolex, or whatever.

The confidence game is a real art — more than just cheating or lying. Those are boring and pathetic vices by comparison. A con job requires something grander, a fast-talking sureness that always seems to be right, even when it’s dead wrong.

If you’re caught in a lie, you just build a bigger lie to hide it.

Which brings us to the subject of ChatGPT, the AI bot that’s the hottest thing in tech right now.

Judging by my Twitter feed, ChatGPT is hotter than Wordle and Taylor Swift combined.

It’s even hotter than its predecessor Sam Bankman-Fried, who was doing something similar 12 months ago. ChatGPT is just better than SamFTX in every way. It can’t even be extradited — because it’s just a bot.

People love it. People have confidence in it.

They want to use it for everything — legal work, medical advice, term papers, or even writing Substack columns. If I believed half of what I heard about ChatGPT, I could let it take over The Honest Broker, while I sit on the beach drinking margaritas and searching for my lost shaker of salt.

But that’s exactly what the confidence artist always does. Which is:

  • You give people what they ask for.
  • You don’t worry whether it’s true or not — because ethical scruples aren’t part of your job description.
  • If you get caught in a lie, you serve up another lie.
  • You always act sure of yourself — because your confidence is what seals the deal.

Am I exaggerating? Is the hottest AI chatbot in the world really doing this?

Instead of offering up my opinions on this, I’ll just share some tweets from knowledgeable observers who are starting to suspect the con.

I’ll let you decide for yourself whether this measures up to a confidence game.

March 11, 2021

QotD: Microsoft PowerPoint

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There were plenty of irritations with life with Microsoft. I am still astonished how bad PowerPoint is from a design point of view. With these multiples, Microsoft could have hired Louise Fili or Milton Glazer, and the virtual world of the corporation would now be vastly more visual. Actually, because form is content, America would now actually be vastly more conceptual. But, no. The PowerPoint templates were clearly designed by that special someone who did Travelodge napkins and match books in the 1960s. Talk about a difference that makes a difference! Talk about critical path dependency! PowerPoint reproduced Microsoft’s limitations, and helped to install them in the American mind.

Still, PowerPoint was an improvement on the Lotus equivalent. I forget what this was called but it was so utterly unpredictable that I discovered belatedly that presentations would not be forthcoming unless you got a group of people to lay their hands on the printer and chant in Latin. (This was not in the manual, unless it was cunningly secreted there in invisible ink, perhaps on the page that read “this page left deliberately blank.”)

Grant McCracken, “Brands that bind … and when they slide”, This Blog Sits at the, 2005-03-10

May 16, 2020

QotD: Division of labour in the modern world

Filed under: Business, Economics, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… digital devices slow us down in subtler ways, too. Microsoft Office may be as much a drag on productivity as Candy Crush Saga. To see why, consider Adam Smith’s argument that economic progress was built on a foundation of the division of labour. His most celebrated example was a simple pin factory: “One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points” and 10 men together made nearly 50,000 pins a day.

In another example — the making of a woollen coat — Smith emphasises that the division of labour allows us to use machines, even “that very simple machine, the shears with which the shepherd clips the wool”.

The shepherd has the perfect tool for a focused task. That tool needs countless other focused specialists: the bricklayer who built the foundry; the collier who mined fuel; the smith who forged the blades. It is a reinforcing spiral: the division of labour lets us build new machines, while machines work best when jobs have been divided into one small task after another.

The rise of the computer complicates this story. Computers can certainly continue the process of specialisation, parcelling out jobs into repetitive chunks, but fundamentally they are general purpose devices, and by running software such as Microsoft Office they are turning many of us into generalists.

In a modern office there are no specialist typists; we all need to be able to pick our way around a keyboard. PowerPoint has made amateur slide designers of everyone. Once a slide would be produced by a professional, because no one else had the necessary equipment or training. Now anyone can have a go — and they do.

Well-paid middle managers with no design skills take far too long to produce ugly slides that nobody wants to look at. They also file their own expenses, book their own travel and, for that matter, do their own shopping in the supermarket. On a bill-by-the-minute basis none of this makes sense.

Why do we behave like this? It is partly a matter of pride: since everyone has the tools to build a website or lay out a book, it feels a little feeble to hand the job over to a professional. And it is partly bad organisational design: sacking the administrative assistants and telling senior staff to do their own expenses can look, superficially, like a cost saving.

Tim Harford, “Why Microsoft Office is a bigger productivity drain than Candy Crush Saga”, The Undercover Economist, 2018-02-02.

May 10, 2019

Microsoft can’t get worse than old Clippy? “Hold my non-alcoholic beer”

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Libby Emmons reports on a new Microsoft Word plugin that puts Clippy into the history books:

Coming soon to a word processing app you probably already subscribe to is Microsoft’s new Ideas plugin. This leap forward in the predictive text trend will endeavor to help you be less offensive. Worried you might be a little bit racist? A little gender confused? Not sure about the difference between disabled persons and persons who are disabled? Never fear, Microsoft will fix your language for you.

Using machine learning and AI, Microsoft’s Ideas in Word will help writers be their least offensive, most milquetoast selves. Just like spell check and grammar check function, Ideas will make suggestions as to how to improve your text to be more inclusive. On the surface, this seems like a terrible idea, but when we dig further beneath the impulse, and the functionality of the program, it gets even worse. What’s happening is that AI and machine learning are going to be the background of pretty much every application, learning from our behaviours not only how we’d like to format our PowerPoint presentations, but learning, across platforms, how best to construct language so that we say what we are wanted to say as opposed to what we really mean.

There is an essential component of honest communication, namely that a person express themselves using their own words. When children are learning to talk and to articulate themselves, they are told to “use your words.” Microsoft will give writers the option of using someone else’s words, some amalgamation of users’ words across the platform, and the result will be that the ideas exhibited will not be the writer’s own.

April 22, 2019

Internal challenges to Microsoft’s current discriminatory hiring practices

Filed under: Business, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Quartz, Dave Gershgorn looks at how Microsoft is facing internal dissent over their current hiring practices, which actively encourage discrimination against certain racial and gender groups:

Some Microsoft employees are openly questioning whether diversity is important, in a lengthy discussion on an internal online messaging board meant for communicating with CEO Satya Nadella.

Two posts on the board criticizing Microsoft diversity initiatives as “discriminatory hiring” and suggesting that women are less suited for engineering roles have elicited more than 800 comments, both affirming and criticizing the viewpoints, multiple Microsoft employees have told Quartz. The posts were written by a female Microsoft program manager. Quartz reached out to her directly for comment, and isn’t making her name public at this point, pending her response.

“Does Microsoft have any plans to end the current policy that financially incentivizes discriminatory hiring practices? To be clear, I am referring to the fact that senior leadership is awarded more money if they discriminate against Asians and white men,” read the original post by the Microsoft program manager on Yammer, a corporate messaging platform owned by Microsoft. The employee commented consistently throughout the thread, making similar arguments. Quartz reviewed lengthy sections of the internal discussion provided by Microsoft employees.

“I have an ever-increasing file of white male Microsoft employees who have faced outright and overt discrimination because they had the misfortune of being born both white and male. This is unacceptable,” the program manager wrote in a comment later. The Microsoft employees who spoke to Quartz said they weren’t aware of any action by the company in response, despite the comments being reported to Microsoft’s human resources department.

When contacted by Quartz, Microsoft pointed to comments by three company officials in the message-board threads. A member of Microsoft’s employee investigations team responded to the initial post in January, writing that the company does not tolerate discrimination of any kind. Another Microsoft staff member, who leads the team that helps the board of directors determine executive pay, explained the diversity-based compensation initiative. “Our board and executive leadership team believe diverse and inclusive teams are good for business and consistent with our mission and inspire-to culture,” she wrote. “Linking compensation to these aspirations is an important demonstration of executive commitment to something we believe strongly in.

April 13, 2017

Microsoft buries the (security) lede with this month’s patch

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Register, Shaun Nichols discusses the way Microsoft has effectively hidden the extent and severity of security changes in this month’s Windows 10 patch:

Microsoft today buried among minor bug fixes patches for critical security flaws that can be exploited by attackers to hijack vulnerable computers.

In a massive shakeup of its monthly Patch Tuesday updates, the Windows giant has done away with its easy-to-understand lists of security fixes published on TechNet – and instead scattered details of changes across a new portal: Microsoft’s Security Update Guide.

Billed by Redmond as “the authoritative source of information on our security updates,” the portal merely obfuscates discovered vulnerabilities and the fixes available for them. Rather than neatly split patches into bulletins as in previous months, Microsoft has dumped the lot into an unwieldy, buggy and confusing table that links out to a sprawl of advisories and patch installation instructions.

Punters and sysadmins unable to handle the overload of info are left with a fact-light summary of April’s patches – or a single bullet point buried at the end of a list of tweaks to, for instance, Windows 10.

Now, ordinary folk are probably happy with installing these changes as soon as possible, silently and automatically, without worrying about the nitty-gritty details of the fixed flaws. However, IT pros, and anyone else curious or who wants to test patches before deploying them, will have to fish through the portal’s table for details of individual updates.

[…]

Crucially, none of these programming blunders are mentioned in the PR-friendly summary put out today by Microsoft – a multibillion-dollar corporation that appears to care more about its image as a secure software vendor than coming clean on where its well-paid engineers cocked up. The summary lists “security updates” for “Microsoft Windows,” “Microsoft Office,” and “Internet Explorer” without version numbers or details.

November 28, 2016

Legalized political corruption

Filed under: Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Walter Williams on the real danger the hyper-rich pose to the body politic:

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, having a net worth of $81.8 billion, and Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, having a net worth of $70.4 billion, are the nation’s two richest men. They are at the top of the Forbes 400 list of America’s superrich individuals, people who have net worths of billions of dollars. Many see the rich as a danger. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote, “It doesn’t really matter what ordinary people want. The wealthy call the tune, and the politicians dance.” His colleague Paul Krugman wrote, “On paper, we’re a one-person-one-vote nation; in reality, we’re more than a bit of an oligarchy, in which a handful of wealthy people dominate.” It’s sentiments like these that have led me to wish there were a humane way to get rid of the rich. For without having the rich around to be whipping boys and distract our attention, we might be able to concentrate on what’s best for the 99.9 percent of the rest of us.

Let’s look at the power of the rich. With all the money that Gates, Bezos and other superrich people have, what can they force you or me to do? Can they condemn our houses to create space so that another individual can build an auto dealership or a casino parking lot? Can they force us to pay money into the government-run — and doomed — Obamacare program? Can they force us to bus our children to schools out of our neighborhood in the name of diversity? Can they force us to buy our sugar from a high-cost domestic producer rather than from a low-cost Caribbean producer? The answer to all of these questions is a big fat no.

You say, “Williams, I don’t understand.” Let me be more explicit. Bill Gates cannot order you to enroll your child in another school in order to promote racial diversity. He has no power to condemn your house to make way for a casino parking lot. Unless our elected public officials grant them the power to rip us off, rich people have little power to force us to do anything. A lowly municipal clerk earning $50,000 a year has far more life-and-death power over us. It is that type of person to whom we must turn for permission to build a house, ply a trade, open a restaurant and do myriad other activities. It’s government people, not rich people, who have the power to coerce us and rip us off. They have the power to make our lives miserable if we disobey. This coercive power goes a long way toward explaining legalized political corruption.

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