They had Skype! It was the verb for video calling for god’s sake! How do you LOSE so BADLY so CONSISTENTLY and STILL have investors.
you literally have access to all the code in the world
I’d like to believe that they were honorable enough to not secretly train on code without people’s permission. But realistically they totally did exactly that, but just made the AI Model this incompetent through some other engineering blunder.
Also, random side thought - training only on public repos probably yields you way higher code quality as opposed to training on both public and private repos? I assume we all have some very messy private repos that we’re too embarrassed to publish because the code quality is absolute shit … right?
I’m always so extremely confused about the trope of the personal project having shit quality… Like, if I’m doing something for myself, that’s exactly the place where I wanna do something amazing, like literally all my private projects have much higher quality than my work ones - because in the work ones I’m forced to use stupid conventions, old tools, am not supposed to touch “legacy” code, etc etc etc
As such, since companies have their private code on GitHub, that’s where I would expect the shittiness to come from, not personal private projects.
I would love my personal projects to be of the highest quality but unfortunately i need to pay bills so i have to prioritize my work projects that get me paid
Like, if I’m doing something for myself, that’s exactly the place where I wanna do something amazing,
That’s always my intention with my personal projects too! But that always results in “Wow I just learned how to do this thing much better, let me refactor the whole project to do it perfectly everywhere” followed by my Adderall running out. So there’s just so many half-done refactors I either forget about or abandon because I get a new idea the next day, but that’s totally just a skill issue.
You’re right though, the code I write at work is much worse, but my Company hosts their own GitLab instance so the code we write can’t even be used to poison Copilot :(
Maybe they meant abandoned projects that never quite got through the todo list but you’re right. Even my abandoned projects are generally better than the legacy I’ve seen lol
I was using tabnine before copilot was even announced… they are the ones who fumbled this more than github.
Have all the code in the world
Create LLM for software development
Try to advertise it
Oops, no budget
Get acquired by Microsoft
Enshittification ensues
Everyone else loots your code repos
Microsoft tries to put your coding tool in everything
Coding tool injected into Excel
Into Word
Into Teams Chat
Nobody knows what this is even supposed to do anymore
Copilot now synonymous with Clippy
Yeah, can’t even begin to imagine how this happened.
Microsoft acquired GitHub way before LLMs existed.
And the ONE useful feature (summarizing meeting transcripts) is behind a paywall corporate doesn’t want to touch.
“What do you mean this 4 hour meeting could be summed up in a single, 100 word paragraph without losing any important context or decision???” - higher ups seeing the summarized transcript, probably
I mean, Microsoft’s biggest mistake was shoving it in front of everyone’s faces. The real reason that all the other “agentic BS” is received well is because the people who use them have an actual use case, or, are very enthusiastic about the technology and enjoy messing with it. Thus the discussion is mostly from that small group of people who will have something positive to say.
The truth is, that all the models and harnesses suck for most use cases that most people have. When you shove it in front of a general audience and make them interact with it, then the discussion will be about how bad it is.
If agentic LLMs are the prize, I’d be fine with losing.
It is truly, deeply amazing how bad Microsoft is. Proton on Linux is FASTER than the actual directX it’s emulating is on windows. They got beat at their own instruction layer.
And they had Skype, which was practically a genericized trademark for “video call–” until first Apple’s FaceTime and then Zoom utterly took them apart.
And they had Office, which defined the product category so completely that it’s called “office software–” but then Google Docs took them apart on a molecular level.
Microsoft is the king of snatching defeat from the clutching jaws of victory.
Google docs is far worse than office, in every way except for collaboration. It does not destroy them at all. LibreOffice is on par except for having no collaboration, but is not widely used so definitely haven’t destroyed them. Office is still very successful and probably won’t be gone anytime soon
Office is still very successful and probably won’t be gone anytime soon
Unfortunately for almost the entirety of the corporate world and govt bureaucracy.
And discord somehow took everyone from skype.
And from TeamSpeak.
but then Google Docs took them apart
Tapping the breaks on that one.
Google Docs is very lightweight, but it’s also very stripped down. Word remains the first choice in word processors for 90% of the market. It (and Excel) are a big reason offices haven’t seriously begun abandoning Microsoft.
I don’t think that’s the case, but I only have anecdotal evidence for that. I haven’t ever worked at a company where Office was the preference, and the last three I’ve worked at didn’t even offer it as a default. And I’m in my forties.
Many govt agencies around the world pay for Office 365 or similars. Where I work (govt health), some higher ups demand pro-level M$ office accounts. Those ain’t cheap.
I suspect the vast majority of USA govt (state and federal), plus many European govts, pay a fortune for Office
I haven’t ever worked at a company where Office was the preference,
I haven’t worked at an office where it wasn’t. And I’ve done years of consulting at Deloitte, so I’ve seen a few places.
which defined the product category so completely that it’s called “office software–”
Err, no it’s called office software because it’s software you use in an office. Microsoft didn’t invent the word “office”.
Microsoft acquired Skype, did not create it. Then destryed it with its own hands.
It wasn’t that they destroyed it, it was more that they let it bit rot. Skype was honestly never a great user experience by today’s standards. The audio was bad, the connection was very unstable over mobile networks, and push notifications for calls was hit or miss. Microsoft acquired it, slapped a Microsoft login screen on it and then basically didn’t do anything to improve it. Meanwhile, Google created and killed seventy different video calling apps, which all worked better than Skype, and Apple stuck the landing with FaceTime.
They acquired practically everything they have. They haven’t created anything truly new since the mid-90s.
They also had Internet Explorer. When it was released it was actually good (compared to the competition). Internet Explorer was dominant, but then it turned into the punching bag of web browser memes.
I think that Microsoft is paralyzed by corporate culture. Everything needs to be signed off by multiple stakeholders, everything needs a dozen meetings before anyone can make a decision, and as a result the stuff that’s “good enough” (read: still making money) languishes–or worse, becomes a dumping ground for whatever corporate pet project is exciting–until it’s unacceptably awful, mired under decades of technical debt and spaghetti code fixes.
At least they have the sense to let the successful companies they acquire manage themselves. There’s no AI in Minecraft, for instance.
Is Google Docs as popular as Microsoft Office?
I work in finance/insurance and can’t see a way to move away for Excel (there’s still there spreadsheets with 10+ years still being used).
My wife’s company uses GDocs, but they’re do food research and barely uses those programs.
This is because Microsoft intentionally breaks excel and PP compatibility with Google docs in small but important ways. It’s the only thing keeping them afloat at this point. I have gotten into heated debates at work over this, because I prefer Google docs, but my boss will be like “we need to deliver this to customers who will open it in office and the formatting will break” and I’m like “that’s what a pdf is for.”
yup. anything you ship to anyone should be PDF regardless.
I would doubt it, it is nowhere near as good as office and google sheets specifically has much smaller worksheets than excel, with only 26 rows.
Do you mean… columns?
But Google Sheets isn’t limited to 26 rows, 26 columns, or 26 worksheets. Idk what GP was talking about. It’s certainly limited but not to that extent
As far as I can tell, Google Docs is at feature-parity with Office, and yes, is incredibly popular. The contest might be a bit more even in the corporate space, but at the last three companies I’ve worked for, GSuite was the default and you had to ask for Office.
Proton (and Wine, what it’s based on) are not emulators. They are compatibility layers, it translates Windows system calls to native Linux system calls.
Or simply put: Wine Is Not an Emulator
That isn’t “simply put”. It’s a witty way to phrase half the comment, completely omitting the other half that actually explains what it does. WINE is a clever abbreviation as a name for the tool, but the opposite of descriptive about its purpose or function.
WNE?
Ah, WINAE.
“Wine Is No Emulator” works ;)
Yes… I actually cannot fathom just how incessantly bad a company can manage to be, and how some people still refuse to realise how there’s literally nothing of value to be had from anything made by Microsoft.
Fucking linux nerds (that was for someone I just met on here). Anyway, yea, my company got three licenses for it, biggest waste of budget ever. I dunno what they clamped on top of open AI, but it’s just terrible. It can’t even parse a spreadsheet correctly.
Just like Skype getting lapped by Zoom during COVID
Lol! Be like GitLab instead:
1 - Be the underdog with good reputation in a market completely monopolized;
2 - Have the incumbent self-destruct by vibecoding its product and pushing AI above every other feature to its customers;
3 - Loudly announce that you are leaving your past good behavior behind, and that you are betting everything on vibecoding and pushing AI to your customers!
The US Govt. as a customer, and the forges they operate / contract, being pushed to use AI is probably (unfortunately) a huge piece of this problem.
Yeah the push to use AI comes from above, and it’s not just in the US. Anyone who’s at the top levels of any company now can tell you that the party line is AI positivity and insistence that workers adopt it into their workflows, even if they themselves see little use for it or can find a way to incorporate it into their own workflows yet.
Microsoft could have been king with with chatgpt for personal superapp, github copilot for developers and something like sharepoint/power vibe widgets. But nooo, they make windows recall when ai models can’t run locally
if they had made a unified copilot agent they would have won. Think open claw with the power of NPUs for small tasks and cloud for big queries dedicated APIs for interacting with all the microsoft products special tailored version for developers. More focus on retrieving information and doing small tasks for the user than generating slop.
The first versions they released were so fucking bad and every app had basically just a chatbot with zero functionality. It ruined the product for when it could actually do tasks.
So what do we use now?
I just wrote a tiny bit of code, a cute little GLSL shader than generates some shapes in a Voxel modeling tool I like. Would love to share it. Most of the shaders I use were found on GitHub. I was going to use GitLab but then realized it was like a second life bar of the same GitBoss.
I have no idea where to host my little scripts now.
Codeberg
Codeberg or Sourcehut got you covered 🙂
Unless you want private repos and free CI, which are a pretty huge benefit of Github. I haven’t personally seen any issues with Github despite all the moaning about uptime, and I use it a fair bit. I think it’s going to take a lot more for them to become another SourceForge. Like, if they introduce banner ads for example.
Microsoft never fails to disappoint
Be Skype. You literally are the first one. You literally are the only one. Covid happens. Zoom pops up from nowhere and takes everyone. You die.
Still, still, I’m like, how???
Failing successfully tho.
Huh. I guess Microsoft and I have that in common.
🥁
You forgot the symbol crash at the end. How disappointing.
Typical!
It’s really so funny to watch when you don’t use any of their junk
Their idea was that OpenAI was so far ahead of the competition no one could ever catch up. Turns out they weren’t and now they’re at the bottom.
At the bottom? Is there a single LLM that has surpassed ChatGPT?
EDIT: I missed Gemini 3.1 pro
Still, saying “Everyone else catched up and it’s at the bottom now” is seriously out of touch thing to say
Claude
Claude outperforms in coding and agentic tasks. I asked about LLM as a chat model. It’s still in benchmarks at the top, and still the most popular one, by far.
Even with Claude, the difference isn’t big and it’s the only one that managed to surpass it in benchmarks, so… still - at the bottom? You sure about that?
The context was about coding specifically tho
I was directly questioning the “at the bottom” phrase, not the entire context. Context matters, or something
That being said:
Google: “We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI”. Prophetic words.
It’s so beautiful to read a giant corporation realise that they are hopeless and have no game to play.
I see this as proof of how bad LLMs actually are. You have an AI trained on essentially humanity’s collective programming library. Languages of machines and computers. The result should be ungodly and near perfection. If there was any semblance of understanding in AI, it should be revealed in it’s capability to produce code.
Although… I can definitely see Microsoft thinking that their code is the example of perfection and training copilot on that rather than github.
should be ungodly and near perfection
Counterpoint: garbage in, garbage out
Oh right, that.
Your proof of how bad LLMs are is the fact that there are a bunch of other companies producing way better coding agents and coding models than Microsoft is? I’m not sure how that follows. Those other agents are good, that’s the point of this.
It’s wild to me that people are constantly complaining how “bad” LLMs are, because what, it can make mistakes or it’s not orders of magnitude smarter than the smartest humans???
It makes mistakes with an alarming frequency, all with the same confident tone of writing as when it says anything else. It’s wrong so often that you’d need to use another source of information just to confirm it, which defeats the point in using AI in the first place!
It’s not smarter than the smartest humans, or even AS smart as them, or even as smart as REGULAR humans. It’s not even smart. It’s a magic eight ball that sometimes has the correct answer by pure chance. No intellect. No reasoning. Just probability.
Also: It steals from just about everyone; it encourages suicides and mass shootings; it’s frequently racist in its outputs; it’s burning, boiling and polluting the planet; it’s being forced on people who don’t want it; and billionares are using it to manipulate people. Probably some other stuff I forgot to mention.
Just in case you weren’t sure why AI is bad.
I would (probably not literally) wager that by “this” they meant *looks around at entire world*…
this
Do they still do Hungarian warts?
