Microsoft blocks the word Microslop on its Copilot Discord, bans users, and locks channels after backlash, showing tensions around its AI push
      • Leon@pawb.social
        7·
        2 days ago

        Teams is such a stupid piece of software. At first I was like “well this will make organising things really easy!” but I quickly learned that everyone has their own ideas about organisation and the moment a new person pops in there’s a new way of doing it. The end result is a chat application with a fuckton of random files flying around, various applications just smashed into it, and it tries to do so many things that it barely works for the core features it should be used for.

        Turns out, the best way to organise files was to have a common system and just use the regular FS all along. Who would’ve thought it?

        • collapse_already@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          2 days ago

          You left out the fun part where Teams itself gets an update that moves or deprecrates a feature you are accustomed to.

          It is so cumbersome to use. Which chat did I see that vital piece of information in? Why does a feature that used to open in Teams itself now open a browser window to display it?

          • Leon@pawb.social
            3·
            2 days ago

            Mine has a permanent warning triangle telling me something is wrong with one of my accounts but it doesn’t tell me what or how to fix it. Neither account seems to be problematic either.

            It also spontaneously updates and withholds notifications from me. I don’t really sit with my nose in Teams all the time, so every so often I’ll remember to check it and notice a colleague has sent me a question or something 4 hours ago. 💀

            Honestly just give me an IRC or something instead.

  • Janx@piefed.socialEnglish
    44·
    2 days ago

    Anything but address the core issue. Consumers overwhelmingly see almost no benefit from AI, are sick of it being stuffed into everything, sick of being forced to use it at work, sick of being forced to fund it in our retirement accounts, sick of our water being used for it in the datacenters they’re building, and sick of consumer products being out of stock or skyrocketing in price because of it… Banning a word won’t solve any of that!

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
    97·
    2 days ago

    …Who would be in the Microsoft Discord? Why?

    Wasn’t there some old internet saying that once megacorps join a social media platform en masse, it’s uncool? What happened to that?

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
        11·
        2 days ago

        Is this true anymore?

        I feel like corporate astroturfing has gotten so intense that users are either oblivious, or get acclimated to it and keep using the platform. Because, you know, where else are you gonna go?

    • rozodru@piefed.worldEnglish
      232·
      2 days ago

      believe it or not there are microsoft fanboys so it doesn’t surprise me there is a discord. You can also find A LOT of them on bluesky of all places where they seem to be worse than the “just use linux” people.

      • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
        16·
        2 days ago

        You can also find A LOT of them on bluesky of all places where they seem to be worse than the “just use linux” people.

        Jesus fucking christ, proselyting for the majority OS for a corporation worth billions?

      • floofloof@lemmy.ca
        6·
        2 days ago

        The Windows subreddit used to be one of the easiest to get banned from. If you made even the slightest hint that Windows wasn’t perfect they’d kick you out. And it wasn’t MS doing this: it was their fans.

      • Duamerthrax@lemmy.worldEnglish
        81·
        2 days ago

        I use to go to lan parties and the amount of fellating of microsoft shit was off the scale. I once heard someone getting shittalked for having an apple monitor hooked to their windows pc. But if you ask them for some tech help with a problem, they give you the most jank solution. Or they tell you to install some weird ass driver off a sketchy website. No wonder they have to use antivirues.

        For a long time, I was platform agnostic and eventually I gave up on antivirus hopping and I realized that if you don’t actually download weird shit or run shit without vetting it, you don’t get viruses. I kept windows on its own partition and never granted it write access to anything else to be safe, but I never had a problem.

        • rozodru@piefed.worldEnglish
          4·
          2 days ago

          or a long time, I was platform agnostic and eventually I gave up on antivirus hooping and I realized that if you don’t actually download weird shit or run shit without vetting it, you don’t viruses.

          THANK YOU. in my 30+ years of computing I’ve never run any anti-virus on anything and surprise surprise I’ve never once had a system crash or corrupted from a virus, trojan, malware, whatever simply because I never downloaded shady shit. I’ve had people become visibly upset with me because I’ve said to people “you don’t need anti-virus if you’re smart about what you’re doing” even people in the linux community have called it bullshit. it’s not.

          it just boggles my mind that people build their entire personality and devote themselves to multi-billion dollar companies like windows or simply platforms like Linux. I use Linux, I don’t care if people use Windows and trust me if something went south with Linux or Microsoft massively improved Windows I’d honestly go back to it. I’m a fan of stuff that works. that’s it.

          • Duamerthrax@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            2 days ago

            Antiviruses also don’t solve the problem of hardware failure. You should be backing up important data anyway. If you still some how get a virus, just reformat and restore.

            • rozodru@piefed.worldEnglish
              2·
              2 days ago

              yup that’s way more important and easier. I have system configurations backed up to my private git repo, locally on an external drive, and offsite. then for important docs/files/etc both a local and offsite backup. all run via borg.

    • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
      21·
      2 days ago

      This is almost certainly a work-related thing. Most people, even on Windows, hate Teams and don’t use it unless they have to for their job.

      • jtrek@startrek.website
        13·
        2 days ago

        I used to think “Teams can’t be that bad” and then I had to use it for work. It’s astonishingly bad. I’m not sure if it’s just how they use it at this place, but it’s bad.

        Everything is a chat. There’s no channels. So nothing is discoverable, and if you sort of remember a conversation you have to see if it was in the standup chat, in the planning chat, in a ad hoc chat…

        There’s no threads. So if you have a chat for say release-123, and someone says “Feature 1 has a bug” and someone else says “Feature-2 has a bug”, you can’t isolate them in separate threads. It’s all flat so they smash into each other.

        • toddestan@lemmy.world
          2·
          2 days ago

          Actually Teams has both channels and threads, it’s just that they are so cumbersome and clunky and unintuitive that no one seems to use them or even realize they are there. Hence the reason there’s like a dozen similar group chats all with a different subset of people in them. Oh, and some of these group chats were originally created from some meeting months ago so they are in a completely different list than the other group chats for some reason.

          Personally, I find Teams to be a huge productivity killer. It’s constantly interrupting my work and demanding my attention because there’s some conversation going on in one of the group chats that’s completely irrelevant to me, but I can’t just put damn thing on mute because while the signal to noise ratio is low, I can’t just completely ignore the signal part either. If I could only convince people that disseminating important information only through Teams in some random chat room is just a bad idea, but alas I have seemed to have lost that battle.

          • jtrek@startrek.website
            1·
            1 day ago

            Notably, slack doesn’t have this problem. Slack pretty consistently behaved exactly as I expected. You have channels organized by topic. You have private messages that are private. You can have group DMs but don’t do that. I guess a problem is some people are kind of stupid and don’t see why many permutations of non-discoverable chats are a bad idea. My old CEO, who I would not say is a universally smart man, would always create group DMs and I had to tell him if he wants this chat to be canonical put it in the relevant public channel. “We value transparency” he’d say at meetings, and then bork that up.

            I have a couple friends who have only ever used Teams and I don’t think they realize just how bad it is.

            It’s kind of infuriating to me that Microsoft can consistently deliver bad products and not die. If a startup released Teams, no one would use it and they would rightfully fail.

        • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
          5·
          2 days ago

          It’s a good example of why no one ever tried to build an ‘everything’ app. It just doesn’t work, and there are so many terrible design decisions, like having multiple places you have to go to manage settings, where most apps have only one.

        • floofloof@lemmy.ca
          2·
          2 days ago

          Every time I have to start a new chat it takes me 10 minutes to figure out how to do it. The Teams UI is positively hostile.

  • drcobaltjedi@programming.dev
    47·
    2 days ago

    You know, the CEO could basically end “microslop” over night. Kill their AI division and investments and for the most part people would stop calling them microslop. They got the name after the CEO complained about the use of the word slop for AI slop.

    Idk, this is just me, some regular dude not being paid enough to own 7 homes and a vacation home for when I need to get away.

      • Agrivar@lemmy.worldEnglish
        121·
        2 days ago

        There’s a lovely browser plugin that automagically changes “Microsoft” to “Microslop” and “Satya Nadella” to “Slopya Nutella” and I’m never uninstalling it now!

  • schroedingersKoala@piefed.caEnglish
    401·
    2 days ago

    I mean, it really earned, that name, you know: MICROSLOP! MICROSLOP! MICROSLOP! MICROSLOP! MICROSLOP!
    Maybe their CEO Slopya Nutella should not be so thin skinned? He is to majorly blame for 99% of this MICROSLOP!

  • Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club
    31·
    2 days ago

    If Windows 11 detects that you said, typed, or thought of the word “microslop” it deletes all your data, and sends your personal data to the CIA Grok that then promptly sends you to your nearest gulag.

  • CerebralHawks@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    45·
    2 days ago

    So, they’re going to stop pushing AI slop…?

    No?

    Then they’re not serving you. They’re serving someone else and you’re either the product, or the byproduct. Get a Mac, or switch to Linux, if you’re still running Windows in 2026.

    I mean obviously, “buy a whole new machine” is kind of a tall order, but some of us were willing to vote with our wallets. Linux is free and requires virtually no commitment. It’s pretty trivial to go back to Windows if you really want to do — even from within Linux.

    • FreddiesLantern@leminal.space
      25·
      2 days ago

      I wouldn’t go for a Mac, firstly because I don’t like Macs (never have) but also more importantly, if tradition has shown us anything by now is that Apple likes to wait things out and give it their own spin afterwards.

      • CerebralHawks@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        7·
        2 days ago

        Oh no, I mean you’re right about Apple sitting and waiting (like they did with the iPod 25 years ago, like they’re doing with foldable phones now), but Apple has always pushed AI. They just push AI like they push gaming, just enough to say they do to make the investors happy. Siri has always sucked for what people want it to do. Apple Intelligence is a straight-up non-starter. Now the investors are pushing them to release some AI, so they’re partnering with Google (Gemini). And that was supposed to be in 26.4 but now it’s being pushed back yet again. Essentially, Cupertino is digging its heels with AI. They need to be dragged kicking and screaming by the investors.

        Totally fair if you don’t like the platform. There have been some straight up trash Macs Apple has never apologised for, it’s always “meh, just buy the next one.” I struck gold buying in the M2 generation (M2 Pro desktop, M2 base laptop). Everything’s trying to support the M1, and I have like a 12% advantage over that, and the power in the M4 and M5 generations is attracting both customers and developers. And all the M-chips are super power efficient, which is great for the laptops. I don’t think there are any bad M-series Macs, except the ones with 8GB RAM. And even then…

        But yeah, if you already have working hardware, Linux is the better option. Even if you don’t, there are cheap PCs that can be had for less than the base Mac mini ($500). And then you can go back to Windows if you aren’t ready to jump into the deep end of saying “fuck Microslop.” Same is true of Intel Macs, but the M-series, I don’t think they can run Windows. They could run Windows for ARM if drivers are available but I’m not sure what the status of that is, or if there would even be a benefit (namely running legacy Windows code, for x86 and x86-64 — if you can’t do that, a Linux distro with Proton would be a better option to dual boot into or to replace macOS with if you wanna go that way, but again, you can get to Linux for less).

        • stoy@lemmy.zipEnglish
          4·
          2 days ago

          Siri is excellent for the one usecase I use it for.

          Checking open hours while driving.

    • the_riviera_kid@lemmy.worldEnglish
      201·
      2 days ago

      Telling people who are sick of mircoslop to get a mac is like telling people who are sick of getting punched in the face to get punched in the throat instead.

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
      8·
      2 days ago

      That’s what’s interesting about Microsoft, their customer is usually not the user. It’s the hardware vendor. It is the company you work for. They get money for enabling those people to get what they want with only the obligatory effort to make the users accept it. Frequently those customers want to act against the interests of the users, and Microsoft is there for it.

      • CerebralHawks@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        True; we use Windows at work, and I honestly wouldn’t recommend they switch to Linux (or Macs, for that matter, though that would be entertaining). I also wouldn’t want to be IT if they do switch operating systems. I do feel that both are better, but I’ve also been using Windows since 3.1 (early 90s), Linux off and on since the late 90s, and macOS since Ventura (2020? 2021? Something like that). So I’m good with whatever. I’ve talked to people (mostly, Boomers) who tell me they’re sick of Microslop’s shit, and I’ve told them “just get a Mac,” but using a whole other computer is scary. I bring up Linux and how it being hard to use is mostly an online myth and it’ll run on their computer alongside Windows while they learn… they’re not willing to jump. Imagine if they were forced to at work. It would not be okay for weeks, if not months.

      • floofloof@lemmy.ca
        4·
        2 days ago

        If it’s for general desktop use you’ll have an easier time with Linux than BSD. There’s more support and a bigger community, which means plenty of distros that just work out of the box. You’ll have to do more tuning and configuration for yourself in BSD, and there’s more chance of finding some device lacks a driver.

        • Maeve@kbin.earth
          1·
          2 days ago

          Then the parents will continue to overpay for stuff they will never need. I’m not arguing over it. Thanks for that. I just want a (mostly) usable ootb that I can adjust as my personal peculiarities arise.

          • floofloof@lemmy.ca
            3·
            2 days ago

            Not sure I follow. There are plenty of free distros of Linux and BSD, and many are easy enough to use, especially Linux ones. Anyone who doesn’t need a particular piece of Windows- or Mac-specific software can set themselves up with one of these for free.

            If the concern is making the UI look like Mac, you can find desktop environments and themes for Linux that aim to do that. (I expect you can do it in BSD too since it runs some of the same desktop environments.) There are even Linux distros like ElementaryOS that aim for a Mac-ish feel, though personally I wouldn’t choose my whole distro based on a desktop theme since you can tweak that stuff on any distro. If you search for “make linux look like MacOS” you’ll find plenty of sites with instructions.

            • Maeve@kbin.earth
              1·
              2 days ago

              Ohh, I can see how that may have been taken in an unfriendly way! My b. I mean my parental units aren’t going to put in the work, and I’m close enough to visit, but have my own things to do before and after work, and on weekends, too. So I don’t want to argue them into getting it and argue them into doing any updates and bug fixes, nor give up the five minutes that turns into hours doing it for them when I have my home to clean, meal prep, walking the fur baby, grocery shopping, etc. They want the iOS look and feel, not the effort and at their age, I don’t blame them. I don’t even know if I want the effort, but windows is almost useless at this point and if I understand correctly, mint looks pretty easy ootb?

              Anyway I wrote the post before work and expected you to know exactly what I meant, so I am sorry if it seemed unfriendly/unappreciative. You deserve better. And it will probably happen again at some point, with you or anyone else, but I will try to do better.

              • floofloof@lemmy.ca
                2·
                2 days ago

                Its OK, I didn’t find your comment rude, I just felt like I didn’t understand. Mint is very easy and does tend to just work. It’s a good choice, the only drawback really being that its kernel and some of its packages are not always the latest. But most people won’t notice or care about that. I use Mint among other distros on some of my machines.

                I agree with your reasoning: switch your own machine to Linux and get to know it. Leave your parents using what they find easiest, if they’re not technically inclined. Pushing someone to use something because you think it’s a good idea never works if they aren’t enthusiastic too. You just end up receiving frustrated messages holding you responsible for every little thing the machine does that they don’t like. Better not to insert yourself into the picture.

                • Maeve@kbin.earth
                  2·
                  2 days ago

                  Its OK, I didn’t find your comment rude, I just felt like I didn’t understand. Mint is very easy and does tend to just work. It’s a good choice, the only drawback really being that its kernel and some of its packages are not always the latest. But most people won’t notice or care about that. I use Mint among other distros on some of my machines.

                  Thanks, I appreciate you taking my comment in good faith. Wouldn’t the kernal/packages not being the latest be a potential security vulnerability? Are there other distros you would recommend to someone not particularly technically inclined? What about firewalls or other security measures? Can I install straight from a USB or is there some prepatory work to be done, besides partitioning? Can Linux handle partitioning for me? By the by, I’ve also been reading about Windows deleting the Linux partition. Is that preventable? Is there some sort of tutorial for dummies? I may have certain LDs that mess with understanding certain things so it would potentially need to be “for a dummy’s dummy.” I know that’s a lot of questions, and I don’t really expect you to answer them all, hence the request for a decent dummy’s tutorial. And all those questions are really why I’ve not yet done it. I really don’t want to be without my laptop for a week trying to figure out my mistakes while doing everything else, because after work, my brain wants recuperation. Dealing with people who have their own physical and mental health issues can be rewarding, but extremely tiresome.

      • CerebralHawks@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        4·
        2 days ago

        Hopefully someone can give you a good answer. I’m not a Linux user, I’m a Mac user, so I can’t really say what’s what in the world of Linux.

        I do know that generally the GNOME desktop environment favours the look/feel of macOS and the KDE desktop environment favours the look and feel of Windows, but they’re both so much more than that, and they are very much their own thing. It’s not really fair to compare them. It’s more of a starting point. But the idea of a dock at the bottom (or sometimes on the left) and a persistent menu bar on top has been a GNOME thing, and only having the one bar (typically on the bottom) and something resembling a Start menu has been a KDE thing. But you can get GNOME or KDE with just about any distro.

        Something tells me that’s not quite what you were looking for, though.

        • Maeve@kbin.earth
          2·
          2 days ago

          Thank you for honestly answering. I’m looking to get my “mature” and not particularly technologically-inclined self off Windows and elderly parents off iOS.