All that aside, I just wanted to say I really like your name.

My take on this is a little more fundamental than the whole ID/age thing. We all knew this would happen, and why? Because nobody has addressed the first problem. Security is only as strong as the weakest link, and companies are not transparent with customers.

Companies spell out in their Terms and Privacy statements that they have Affiliates that data gets shared with. And they want you to accept them all blindly, without clarifying who they are and what they do.

Even here, with a reported breach, they are not naming them and just calling them “third party”. So they screwed up and many people have their information and IDs out in the wild because if them, but we don’t even get to know who they are?

His are we to trust a company of we don’t know who they’re in bed with? How are we to rate their security and assess our risk of using their service without all the information?

As far as I can tell Discord handled it pretty well as far as breaches go. But maybe if I know they are using a shit company as one of their vendors I might think twice about using them.

Its the same logic as the next article in my feed, where crunchyroll is getting pushback from the subtitle service they are using. And that’s not even their own security in mind. People make choices based on what companies do, so be transparent with it all and we will have the warm fuzzies if things match up. If they don’t then the company gets customer feedback so they can adjust.

Is that an internal KB article or something you send to the customers? If it’s public I’d like to read it for a chuckle.

I get what you’re saying, but my point wasn’t really about viability of their price structure vs cost.

It was the fact that they are offering a personal M365 license AND CoPilot license for $20. If they can do that, they’ve already done the math and are OK with the price.

So if they are OK with the price, why not offer that same discounted bundle to business, adjusted to whatever business license is included?

But no, they want to charge business $30 for CoPilot alone, with no M365 license.

So this strategy is clear, they are trying to compete and gain adoption in the personal space, competing against $20 chatgpt or similar subscriptions. With that in mind, its a great strategy. They gain market share, gain your personal data for their advertising, and further cements people in their ecosystem.

So, lengthy way to get to the point of, they are screwing over businesses without a similar (if not comparable) deal, and then forcing problems because people will just start using their own LLMs for business use which adds a huge shadow IT strain and risk. So business will react in turn and shut it all down, which then kills adoption.

So they’re purposefully shooting themselves in the right foot so they can take a step with their left. It won’t work out in the end.

Their logic is: Workplaces aren’t buying copilot licenses So make a good price on personal licenses

If price is the barrier, maybe bring down that $30 license fee for business (which is on top of the M365 license) to see if adoption grows.

This is not going to win any friends in the business world and will most likely result in blanket bans of AI tools in the workplace to counteract this.

If 12 modems simultaneously handshake and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? You’re damn right it does and probably shattered glass too.

Oh definitely. Xlookup and sumifs are probably my most common formulas. But I also source and combine data sources on a regular basis which is the real hitch in my use.

LibreOffice is great, but one of the problems is its not a business product. So sure, most everyone can do basic stuff and its fine. But if you’re a business, it really won’t cut it. And if you’re a power user of any of the app types, shifting away might not be possible.

But yes, my goal is 100% shift from MS. I just can’t shake excel until there’s a better alternative (or I stop having the need).

No, they shut down Wordpad since it was the awkward step between simple notepad and full blown word processing. It didn’t do anybody any harm, but it never really had a home.

To be fair, I use excel (2019, not 365) frequently and I’m never prompted for anything. I had to jerry rig the installation so only excel installed and not the full suite of products, but other than that it’s been clean and perfect. Sure, I’m missing some features from 365, but one of those missing features is copilot. Everything else is perfect (and I need data sources and some other functions that aren’t in Calc which is why I still use it)

It could be viewed as reasonable if viewed alone. I think that its fine and could make a lot of sense for control over their platform.

The history of reddit sheds a different context in my mind though. Mods are volunteers. Subreddits were established to moderate themselves, implementing nuanced rules for their specific topics that might differ from other subs that need completely different rules and approaches. Its part of what made reddit unique compared to alternate sites.

Then they made moderating much more difficult by eliminating third party apps. Then they started implementing their plans to take the platform where they wanted it, which is fine because its their platform, but they wanted all their mods to do a bunch of work and in a certain manner to make it so. Very demanding on free labor.

So there’s mods still around and they want to restrict them more? Who knows, maybe that’s a great idea but they made the mess they’re in. This decision isn’t a single on on its own, its part of a stack of them.

I wholeheartedly agree with this perspective.

I started on a privacy journey because I didn’t like that I’m being tracked (by basically everybody) and feel that the technology that I pay for should be service to me, not me as a service to it (and its related parties).

Anyways, along the way I did a few things. Namely, I turned off mail notifications (this was an inadvertent feature since my mail service couldn’t send notifications without google services that I removed). I also removed my sim and use data only via a hotspot, to which I don’t always have on. These sound like crazy things, and admittedly they aren’t for everyone, but the resulting mental shifts are exactly to this point.

Just because I have a device that let’s me be available to anybody in any place at any time, doesn’t mean I should be, or even need to be, available unless I want to be.

Now I protect my time, and the mental clarity that comes with it. I never was a doom scroller, but even now that concept is even more reduced. The phone is my tool, and I use when needed.

insurance companies need to be holding the car manufacturer’s feet to the fire by not insuring cars

I agree with the sentiment, but unfortunately that screws over the owners far more and for far longer before it even impacts the car manufacturers.

Maybe a better attack (aside from government regulations) would be banks to not provide financing for loans to buy those cars. In the end, if the car is stolen they are at a loss so that makes sense.

People can’t get loans, so don’t buy the risky vehicle. It hurts a little in the now to direct them towards cars that will not be a problem in the future. And the car companies feel the sting of lost sales right away.

This company needs to get shut down. Invasive. Illegal. Immoral. They are ushering in a police state and anti privacy world, and of course profiting from it.

You can piss on us, but don’t tell us it’s rain.

Not only does it not exist, it isn’t wanted. People are content watching videos on YouTube and Netflix. They don’t care for 4k. Even if they pay extra for Netflix 4k (which I highly doubt they do) I still question if they are watching 4k with their bandwidth and other limiting factors, which means they’re not watching 4k and are fine with it.

I’m OK with your opinion and I appreciate hearing an alternate view to offset the echo chamber effect.

But for a lot of us, or at least me, its far deeper than just cost and ads.

It’s the fact that steps keep being taken to make the platform worse. They don’t want the platform usable unless you pay, and in this case they’re even taking a stab at the people who pay…you don’t pay enough in their mind.

If they had balls, they would just make it a closed platform. Pay to access, and restrict that per account IP. But they’d rather gaslight everybody and slowly turn up he heat so the frogs don’t jump out of the pot. This way they maximize their profits for longer. Point of all of that is, they don’t care about he platform or service at all.

For me, its not even about that. Their algorithm was so jacked up I was sick of being fed videos I didn’t want to see over and over, and videos I’ve already watched over and over. That’s why they added the subscription bell…because you would subscribe to things you wanted to watch and they never showed it to you. It wasn’t “you” tube it was “their” tube.

I bailed on them years ago. I still watch some content on there because there really isn’t a viable alternative. I use a scraper that gives me a feed of just what I want and without ads. I watch what I like and move on with my day. I’m back in control of my video viewing.

Makes me long for the days of google music. It just worked. Streamed stuff and even allowed you to stream your own library that you had stored in drive. I would use that in the car. Then they ditched it for YouTube music, which was a worse experience and lacked the features.

I mean, I’m in the same boat. This doesn’t effect me except for work stuff. But here’s the thing, all of my documents are already backed up to the cloud via OneDrive settings. So this is redundant at best.

At the end of the day, one of the reasons I hate the MS experience is because they push things on you. Its not your PC, its theirs. Hey, you want to use OneDrive? No? Are you sure? No? Are you really sure? No? Why don’t I just turn it on for you so you can see how great it is. You must have turned it off by accident, let me turn it back on. OK, OK I get it you really don’t want to use onedrive. Oh, I forgot that fact once our annual update came out and undid that setting. You straight out uninstalled onedirve and altered your registry? Ok, how about we just upload Word documents for you.

How did you learn to do something? Books, a teacher, and hands on trial and error. I think most people learned most things from somebody who taught them.

When something interested you, you’d go read about it. Learn more, see all the “documentation”. You’d also just do it and see what happens.

The easy access to knowledge today is great, and learning is easier. Its night and day to be able to look up information quickly.

The one benefit beforehand was that information was hard to produce. You couldn’t just record a video in 5 min and upload it to YouTube. You couldn’t just write a book in google docs then upload it to be sold as an eBook. Things took time and money. So if that much investment was needed, it weeded out a lot of bad information. Today, just because it’s online or in print doesn’t make it any more reliable.

Technology has definitely made life easier and more fun. But it’s also a tether people rely on. Maybe even a noose around their neck. I think the fact that people are glued to their phones all the time is very reminiscent of the humans in WallE. It’s sad.

I take the stance that I lived in a time where you couldn’t be reached 24/7 and weren’t expected to always be available. It was okay then so it should be okay now. My phone isn’t always on even though I carry it with me everywhere. If I’m hanging out with you I talk to you, and don’t need to be interrupted by messages or doom scrolling whatever app people like. My time is valuable, as is yours, and I give it the respect it deserves.

Most millenials I deal with don’t know how anything works. They know apps and swiping screens. They are computer competent, knowing how to use them. Like knowing how to drive a car doesn’t mean you are a mechanic. They frequently know how do basic fixes like rebooting or reinstalling but less frequently have any true troubleshooting understanding. I don’t claim all millenials are like that, but broad stroke its not uncommon. I’d never say the generation as a whole is THE technical one though. I know more Gen Z that are technical by far, but that seems more matching Gen X to me. They either know technology or don’t. Nothing in between.