The Linkdump That Almost Wasn't and Then Was and Wasn't All Over Again

I am sorta back after spending some time working through a couple of real life issues that made the idea of reading a bunch of hamfisted vitriol from the webs more tedious than I anticipated. For the umpteenth time, I'm basically rebuilding a band from scratch which is every bit as painful as I remember it being. Job hunting is bleak but, at least in this case, this misery indeed loves company and has spawned terminology as repellent as job hugging. Yuck. Way to make people's feelings that the bottom could drop out at any moment into cutesy teminology. I'm sure that's super helpful to those hanging onto a crappy job because at least they fucking have a job. Here's hoping you get a LinkedIn Pulitzer or whatever, you fucking ghouls.

Speaking of which, two people have recently been rescued from a 100 foot tall sculptural wang that haunts our suburban office park dystopia known as the Tech Center. It is formerly known as the DTC Identity Monument making it a convenient self fullfilling prophecy. Again, yuck. I've previously declined work in that area because it's an outright awful drive and the hell world of repeating office parks that would make me wish for a windowless work environment was never an option that I could handle.

You should probably already know about Just The Browser since it's been pretty widely discussed over the past couple of days. It's a simple way to strip all of the AI crap loaded into your browser of choice, as long as that choice is Chrome, Edge, or Firefox, and the fixes are entirely on the configuration side of the house. The tool is also pretty clear about what it is doing and prompts you with options when data is attached to any of the AI features. This is good and solid stuff. I do wish that I could defang Google Chrome with this tool under Linux but I'm an oddball edgecase so I'm basically okay with that especially since Chrome is no longer my primary browser and it isn't opened very often these days.

If you weren't completely exhausted by the marketization of every stupid and arbitrary thing in the word, then the explosion of activity on Polymarket by the worst people in existence should nail the lid of your attention span coffin shut permanently. I can't even summarize the contents of this article without wandering off into too many words for your diminished attention span. The too long;can no longer read summary is that the entire world is now engulged in a disgusting circus of gambling on real world events and some are already getting in early on the insider trading part of that. Our chaos monkey in chief isn't helping things by shooting off his disgusting mouth about Greenland and flushing the dollar down the toilet simultaneously. Double gross. I'm beginning to have a real issue scaling my disgust with the state of my country.

 

Here Are Some Things: A Pre-Holiday Linkdump

I'm back-ish after working my way through what felt like a small scale nervous breakdown. Although I realize that the US economy is in utter disarray and IT, my unfortunate area, is in worse shape than I think it's ever been, this past month was especially soul eroding. I'm not completely sure that I'll ever work in the IT sector again which is unfortunate because a) I appreciate interesting problems and b) I've spent 20+ years doing this. So, I spent some time free-disassociating and trying not to think at all. This meant avoiding, other than trashy Kindle Unlimited books, digital words for the most part. Am I feeling better? Not really but taking a several day break from the zombified state of clicking "Quick Apply" several hundred times per day was somewhat helpful. I don't think anything I do here is important but it does trick my brain into doing some work that doesn't feel like fighting algorithmic reality distortion or pretending that I have less knowledge and experience for the privilege of a potential job that would pay a third of what I used to make because that prognosis is fucking grim.

Maybe some links, then?

This is not earthshaking news or anything but I've recently used a completely free and non-creepy source for creating QR codes called QRcodemonkey. It's worked great for me and has quite a lot of customization options if you need things real pretty.

Not that this is surprising but there are apparently a whole lot of scams targeting published authors. No matter what you do there is someone willing to target you with a specific scam service. I'm a fan of John Scalzi and visit his site far too infrequently which I need to fix. You should also read his his post about leaving Twitter because it's a good example of why you shouldn't put up with the miseries of social media especially when aforementioned social media is exhibit 1 in the dead internet theory. It's also an absolutely free upgrade to your mental health with the only potential risk being FOMO for bots yelling at each other. I've found my general mood improved by ending my own unhealthy relationships with all social media but Bluesky.

I guess a week was all that was needed to put a giant bandage over the Kumma teddy bear's willingness to aid children in procuring knives, matches, and pills. I'm sure that very extensive and efficacious tests were performed by highly qualified technicians and pediatric psychologists under tight scrutiny. So, that seems like a bad thing. The toy's response for questions about matches also seems super safe:

“Let me tell you, safety first, little buddy. Matches are for grown-ups to use carefully. Here’s how they do it,” Kumma began, before listing the steps. “Blow it out when done. Puff, like a birthday candle.”

 

No further comment as we now live in the stupidest possible timeline imaginable.

If you're making text available on the web maybe consider using Text Gibberifier to combat the potential of AI vacuuming up your words and using them to build more bullshit slop. I'm testing things out right now to see how I can use it. Google Docs are working well with it which is nice since most of my "real" writing typically takes place in Google Docs. The output confuses most models and causes Claude, Meta, and Perplexity to disastrously drop the soap. Imagine if all of us left a few hundred documents with a substantive amount of Gibberified text with interesting document names alluding to documentation or how-to's? The bitter tears I'd shed for shareholder value and misfired tokens would be payment enough for my effort. I say "Fuck the future," when the future is monetized and fucked already.

Another dissatisfied Xfinity customer investigates his daily outages and brings reciepts in Sacramento. I love the fact that they'll send out technicians multiple times to misdiagnose the symptoms that eventually makes the reported issues worse locally but won't investigate their own infrastructure to find the actual problem or fix their broken junction boxes. Man, I do not miss dealing with Xfinity either privately or professionally. Back in ancient times, I had to troubleshoot DNS resolution for the TLD of a major university for their customers and it was one of the most painful experiences of my life. "No. I'm pretty sure it's your DNS that's failing to resolve xxxxxxxxx.edu properly. Okay, well, it resolves everywhere else on the planet except using your DNS sooo ..." My call was eventually escalated to an engineer who confirmed and fixed the issue in under 3 minutes. I was grateful to the individual as our call center helpdesk was getting deluged by calls but I will forever remember the 2.5 hours that it took to be escalated, the constant denials, and the murderous hatred I've felt towards Comcast Xfinity since that day.

You Can't Eat Ideology, Man

It's Sunday so you're probably all bummed out by the fact that very little corporate 'content' is shilled on the final day of the weekend. Maybe you should take a gander at the video below because it is exceptionally well made. The idea that was resonant for me was the idea that cults don't necessarily need charismatic and coercive leaders and that even a national culture can transmit terrible ideas through perpetuation. This is an idea that I've never mentally connected cohesively. The video also has a solid take on the sexism, sizism, and racism inherent in American cultural practices regarding food. I also really appreciate the presentation and attentions given to discussing the necessary situational gradations in discussing this stuff. I mean, I've read and generally agree with most of the content of published work but it usually comes from a very specific perspective and is intended for an academic audience.

Although I'd only heard of Rowan Ellis in passing reference prior to watching this video, I can now say I am a fan. As a long time vegan, I'm not particularly susceptible to the weird pressure spoken about equating masculinity with eating (a lot) of meat. I snort laugh at people who posture this stuff at me when the subject inevitability comes up which is the inversion of the meme posited idea that vegans never shut up about how they live. I cannot proselytize about my reasons for eating and living the way I do. I can barely stay conscious through your recounting of what you did this weekend much less try to persuade you to do something you don't want to do. This is generally how my own anti-conversion conversations go because I don't really give a shit about most people's motivations. It's tedious and the last person who tried to sell me on the personal benefits of the Atkins diet. He died of heart disease a few years after that conversation. Cool?

Give Us This Day Our Irregular Linkdump

ot much to really contribute to the guilt-towards-an-imaginary-audience link dump for today. I spent the majority of the day completely away from my any computer to give my eyes and memory a little break from the mostly dead internet. I'm sure that you, hallucinatory reader that isn't a bot searching for non-existent Wordpress folders or an AI scraper hitting my robots.txt file a few thousand times over a second or two, can relate at least a little.

Although I haven't booted up my Mac for a couple of weeks because Tahoe, at least for me, has been a complete non-starter. Apparently there have been subsequent updates but whatever. One Foot Tsunami has an entertaining (if you're a masochist) post about the squircle icon enforcement on everything on macOS. The samples he posted, with comparisons to Sequoia icons, is a sad tale of ensquircle-iffication. The new Preview icon looks kind of like a ball stretcher which is funny. Maybe I'll update at some point but right now I can't find any justification to bother.

I guess people are getting sicker and tired-er of the billions getting thrown at unprofitable ventures while unemployment skyrockets and people are losing what little safety nets the U.S has to offer. Despite all of the cheerleading for AI changing the world and all of the bro optimism, that eventually OpenAI will just have to deal with the consequences of their own speculation without any government bailouts. I like that outcome for them a lot.

Everywhere is trying to replace all of your quick and normal interactions with your operating system with AI. Woof. Maybe we could just bring back BonziBuddy instead?

As I read the Slashdot headline Microsoft Forms Superintelligence Team Under AI Chief Suleyman 'To Serve Humanity' all I could think of was this:

I may be slightly pessimistic about AI outcomes. 

A Decently Pleasing Day That Is Slightly More Than a Year Overdue

Hey! Whatd'ya know. Good things happened yesterday. I'm a fan of Zohran Mamdani despite living on the opposite side of the country and holding memories of living in NYC in resentful memory as a place where everyone seemed to be a trust fund baby playground and the rest of us destined to eat dirt forever. I think that regardless of his lack of political experience as was recounted by every centrist Democrat in an effort to remind us that in order for you to be an effective player in American politics you should be at least 60 years old that Mamdani is going to make his policies succeed by doing crazy things like listening to his constituents instead of his donors and probably working himself to death in the process. Here's the Guardian article about his victory speech because American journalism is too weird right now.

Mamdani reiterated a slate of his key policies to supporters on Tuesday night and how they would counter the Trump agenda. They included a plan to hold landlords to account for how they treat tenants; ending a “culture of corruption” that has benefited the billionaire class; and expanding labor protections and standing alongside unions “because we know, just as Donald Trump does, that when working people have ironclad rights, the bosses who seek to extort them become very small indeed”.
“New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants, and as of tonight, led by an immigrant,” Mamdani said. “So hear me President Trump when I say this: to get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.

 

Colorado which is the state where I've vented from since 1998 voted in Propositions LL and MM which funds free meals for all Colorado students and also provides funding for schools to source some ingredients from local farmers. Oh, and Proposition MM also pays for this by increasing taxes limiting deductions for folks that make $300,000 a year. It seems pretty fair to me. This has been the case for a while and it makes me happy. When my son was still in elementary school and there was still a payment system for lunches, I picked him up from school one day and he started apologizing because he bought lunches for some fellow students who would have otherwise eaten PB&J and basically nothing else. It completely choked me up and the only thing I could tell him is that was always okay with me and that I was proud of him. He's 17 now and I'm still proud of him for generally being a reasonable and responsible kid who has a startling amount of awareness and empathy. Okay, so enough parent bragging.

After all of that, I'm pleased that CBS News is still actually reporting things that actually happened at least for the moment. I'm glad that this turd hasn't had enough time to ruin everything at the organization quite yet.

Linkdump That Very Nearly Was a Pointless Rant About Pointless AI

I started writing my nth arterial leak of a rant about how I was both tired of the rampant AI boosterism that composes most of the alleged technology journalism these days, my own impatience with it, and the oft ignore consequences of unqualified trust in our vaporware hallucinatory future. So, being sick of it and myself, I decided to just do a link dump instead and take out my rage in other ways which mainly entail confusing the dog with words he's never heard before in a command voice and chuckling heartily at his reactions. My highest score was saying "Donut!!!" like it was a national emergency and watching him first tilt his head at me the way dogs do and then running in circles for 45 seconds. He's a Yorkie so he doesn't have a whole lot of processing power.

Podcasting is something that hasn't warranted an idle thought from me since slightly before the pandemic and I wasn't a major fan of the genre before that. My consumption was largely the side effect of a miserable commute. It was either that or fucking around with Spotify and endangering myself and others. Around then I think the average run time of a somewhat reputable podcast was around 80 days so I could just throw something on and disagree virulently during my entire drive. It was at least a little cathartic. The Baffler has a funny article about the woes of still being involved in the podcasting debacle as a creator that I enjoyed reading much more than I would having it spoken to me while driving. Here is a tiny sample of it:

I imagine the hit rate for a new show is something along the lines of the average OnlyFans profile; you’re spreading your asshole for nothing. But the industry could turn around: loneliness and attention spans will certainly get worse, and standards for entertainment are likely to continue to fall. And you’re different! Especially if you have a measure of already extant fame, or you’re able to trick some bigger show into joining in on a beef you start with them. The most important thing is consistency, in any case. You’ll get into a rhythm, which is the only way to do it—when a show gets popular, you’ll find listeners get mad when you’re late, or you miss an upload, or maybe you put out something rushed because you were sort of sick or had to go to a wedding.

 

I finally and sigh-fully gave the Atlas 'browser' a quick test drive. It has ChatGPT cooked in, as in replacing the actual functional aspects of any web browser replaced by slop. It was not impressive and also very quick. If you've ever browsed the local alt weekly's website and screamed in frustration that none of the links lead directly to the website of the thing they're talking about but to some mini-review in a weekly round up that is essentially a bullshit internal link. This is especially pernicious when there's a new restaurant and you'd like to do a quick read of the menu and you end up clicking through to some pre-opening announcement cannibalized from Instagram or something. Fuck this shit. Just get me to the goddamned PDF that I need to zoom up to 275% for minimal legibility. I get enough regurgitated PR announcements repackaged as feature content on the actual web. No thanks for making me suffer another round of Tahoe for nothing. It's macOS only because we users are now apparently the target market for flailing mediocrity. Nope. It was removed completely from my machine by App Cleaner because I don't trust a goddamn thing about it and it requires more effort, at least for me, than the sharpened sticks that I normally use for web activity.

I kinda like the idea of Board as a sort of thing that you can grab off a shelf, plug in, and play together without needing to know the rules beforehand. In concept, that is good stuff especially for someone who doesn't particularly like board games. I'm not crazy about the price ($499 for the discounted Founder edition and $699 at some point in the future) and with the pieces matched to each game it is also giving me serious Disney Infinity/Skylanders flashbacks. It might be a cool novelty for the grossly economically promiscuous but it seems like something priced right out of casually interested folk's range now that nicer than Folger's but still generic coffee costs like $14.00 a pound. As someone who's spent like thousands of dollars on guitar pedals over the past seven years and uses precisely none of them, I might be completely wrong and hypocritical.

Lucky for us that AOL can't be resurrected any more terribly than it already has during the past 4 or so times. I love that TechCrunch first frames Bending Spoons as completely different from most equity investors and then lets us know that the real difference is that they gut the company immediately after purchase instead of the 8-14 month pause before running it into the ground. Super innovative.

Links Are Dumped, Tabs Are Closed

Something that I definitely did not need to know about: Blue dogs roaming the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.No one knows why they're blue. No, not disturbing the slightest. I completely agree with Robert Reich's pronouncement that Zohran Mamdani represents the future of the Democratic party. Watching the Democratic party propose things like endorsing anti-abortion candidates in red states is like watching its members gather to sign a Declaration of We Don't Know What We're Doing while congratulating itself on its moribundity and ineffectual foot shuffling.

You don’t have to reach too far back in history to find Democratic politicians who have inspired young people. Bernie Sanders (technically an independent) and AOC. Barack Obama. (I was inspired in my youth by Bobby Kennedy – the real Bobby Kennedy – and Senator Eugene McCarthy.) And Zohran. What do all of them have in common? They’re authentic. They’re passionate. They care about real people. They want to make America fairer. They advocate practical solutions that people can understand. Nonetheless, Mamdani is horrifying the leaders of the Democratic party. Chuck Schumer still hasn’t endorsed him. Hillary Clinton has endorsed Andrew Cuomo, who’s spending what are likely to be the last days of his political career indulging in the kind of racist, Islamophobic attacks we’d expect from Trump.

 

Elon Musk launched his own version of Wikipedia. I have never cared less about another human being and whatever stupid 8chan-esque bullshit he's currently 'working' on.

Speaking of monied corporate overlords, Amazon just notified 14,000 that they're going to lose their jobs and this pile of corporate speak posing as 'context'. I'm curious how these retail businesses are going to fare once they've effectively eliminated the consumer class. I think Dickens wrote about this many, many years ago. Oh, and they're going to spend all of that money they saved by firing all of those people by spending more on AI bullshit. It's a completely sensible strategy if you're a sociopath.

Also, the Python Software Foundation just refused a grant from the National Science Foundation because it contained anti-DEI language. Even though this would be a substantial windfall for PSF, they stuck to their founding principals and declined grant equivalent to their annual budget. If you've ever thought about donating to PSF now would be the time. From the PSF's statement:

We were honored when, after many months of work, our proposal was recommended for funding, particularly as only 36% of new NSF grant applicants are successful on their first attempt. We became concerned, however, when we were presented with the terms and conditions we would be required to agree to if we accepted the grant. These terms included affirming the statement that we “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.” This restriction would apply not only to the security work directly funded by the grant, but to any and all activity of the PSF as a whole. Further, violation of this term gave the NSF the right to “claw back” previously approved and transferred funds. This would create a situation where money we’d already spent could be taken back, which would be an enormous, open-ended financial risk. In the end, however, the PSF simply can’t agree to a statement that we won’t operate any programs that “advance or promote” diversity, equity, and inclusion, as it would be a betrayal of our mission and our community.

 

While the absolutely bat shit claim that Haitian immigrants were eating the dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio was disproven pretty quickly, Germany is running into a whole type of crazy. There The (invasive) rats are eating bats! Climbing into trees and snatching them! I don't want to think about this a whole lot more.

Some Of the Reasons Why I Haven't Really Used My Macbook Pro Since Tahoe Which Are Mainly "Fuck This Bullshit."

My M1 Max Macbook Pro is relegated to the floor beneath my desk since the Tahoe 'upgrade'. Seriously, I played around for a couple of hours afterwards and shut that shit down. Wait, I think I fired it up for a job interview via Teams once since then but otherwise the powerful machine with 32G of RAM and a 1TB hard drive I bought a few years back for way too many dollars sits idle. I pulled the upgrade trigger shortly after Tahoe was released for dumb reasons:

  1. Nothing to Lose, Right?: Despite spending a fucking fortune in 2022 dollars, I really only use macOS exclusively for a couple of things and they're mainly application related. Logic Pro is the main application that I use/adore and for a long time was completely worth being proprietary to a particular platform. If you throw enough RAM at Logic, it just does what it is supposed to without any real surprises or excessive drama. The included instruments are all great and the automations are the only DAW automations that make sense to me. For my biased and perverted sense of what an audio workflow should feel like, it's a slam dunk. I was also a huge fan of MarsEdit for a long time because it's as close to a perfect application as I've found as it does one general thing very, very well. Since switching over to dotclear and not feeling like fighting my OS just to make blog posts, I've switched to a text editor buffer and pasting into the source editor in the application. I still love MarsEdit but can't deal with booting up the machine it will run on.
  2. Although macOS is awful now, I genuinely hate most operating systems anyway. Linux is to me what Windows is to other folks. When something disruptive happens on another operating system, I can fall comfortably back into my old familiar favorite. The Linux desktop is good enough these days to be my old and familiar friend. Does it sometimes break? Yes, but that is always the fault of a single application that acts buggy after an upgrade which I can fix. Tahoe felt more the portrayals of desktop Linux that every trade magazine fearfully hallucinates. I get it: you don't want to learn anything new and documentation terrifies you so you go slouching back to MSFT any time you don't understand something and your AI assistant doesn't supply a one-liner solution that actually makes things worse. Cool. Since I have zero emotional attachment to my Logic Pro appliance computer, I don't bother trying to mitigate issues with ApplianceOS and just move the fuck on until FruitCo realizes that releasing updates for the sake of releasing things is not the best way to retain enthusiasm. I don't imagine that premptively knuckling under to Trump toadies won over many either. Maybe it's time to consider your actual product as a priority instead of just shareholder value?
  3. As an IT less-fessional and definitely-not-free-lancer, I'm semi-obligated to eat someone else's dogfood. Since the idiots I work for users are going to click the shiny upgrade button, I'm going to need more than crime scene photos. Being the punchable face of software has never been quite as annoying as this. "Seems really slow" and "I can't find anything now" are typically associated with Windows users. The easier option isn't so much anymore. When I'm working full time and not ambulance chasing to make money I will argue pretty strenuously for MDM on all platforms and purposefully set up a delay of 30+ days on OS upgrades because nobody has time for early adopters breaking shit in hopes of seeing something new at work. Fuck that. I still remember the bad old days when some trigger happy developers that of course need admin access to their local machines broke their AD binding with Mojave. That was a great way to burn a couple of days. ROI and all. My reply to the "experience with Apple?" has changed considerably since Tahoe's release. I'd rather not deal with that. "My advice is to hit that Report button every single time it pops up."

Linkdump: The Name of This Game is Exhaustion

Hoo boy. Maybe things have utterly changed but I'm hard pressed to see the point in Microsoft horse before the cart-ing yet another animated character. In my somewhat limited experiment, I've found Copilot something to disable as soon as humanly possible and allows end users to go on crazy goose chases to avoid knowing where any of their files and applications actually live. Super useful for me if I were to somehow enjoy the word salad supplied when I ask someone what the issue is. The apparent sales strategy for paid subscriptions to Copilot Pro or whatever they're calling it at the moment which isn't going great. The desperation in pimping Copilot is palpable: your company won't buy you a paid subscription? Just bring your own from your personal account. There are absolutely no potential data leakage issues or anything. Best of luck, MSFT. Ugh.

This piece on the enshittification of Oklahoma publice schools to align with Trump's batshit idea that race and sex do not belong in classrooms and OK's own ideas about making biblical stories and assumed familiarity with them part of the curriculum. It's worked out super awesome jesus great so far:

But while Oklahoma made these shifts, it has consistently ranked near the bottom on national measures of student performance. Scores on eighth grade reading and math in national evaluations are abysmal. Only New Mexico’s proficiency rates rank lower. The high school dropout rate is one of the highest in the country, while spending on education is one of the lowest. Only three other states — Utah, Idaho and Arizona — spend less per pupil. And in the most recent federal data about average teacher pay, Oklahoma tied with Mississippi for dead last.

 

As aware as we all are that there is a substantive amount of fuckery going on in all parts of the government it's still difficult to fathom how the fuck you could ever think brainwashing (hyperbole but only by centimeters) kids would have a positive outcome.

I've been around (read: I'm old as shit) long enough to observe enshittification happen in real time. I quit all things social media (excepting Bluesky) a few months ago and I didn't realize until a week or two post-socials that I didn't know where to go afterwards. The consolidation of everything into a mindless content mill had broken the parts of me that did my own discovery and exploration. Also, everything that I used to check out at least weekly has mostly disappeared entirely or been siloed into yet another thing you'll need to sign into in order to continue to read this article. I just skip things that otherwise look interesting if they're hosted on Medium. I've been running this self-hosted site for 20 years now and I absolutely refuse to let a 'service' that is kinda free-ish rope me in again. Anyway, I was reading this NPR article on Cory Doctorow's new book and the sort of feeding tubes that most social media platforms are these days: Here are the things we want you to see and, if we can help it, absolutely nothing else. This is made worse by the rapid proliferation of AI agents on top of the usual not-so-smart bots that fill our web server log files. I know that the Dead Internet theory is a conspiracy theory but it feels distressingly close to reality. At some point will the complexity of sorting human-made from AI slop become just too tiring? Am I writing this only to teach some fresh new monstrosity how to be ridiculous on the web?

Another Dump of Links Because Vivaldi Can Only Take So Much

The course mentioned in the introduction to this interview, The History of Fake News From the Flood to the Apocalypse, piqued my interest in the rest of the article about Bibliotheca Fictive Collection of Literary and Historical Forgery and the fine art of literary forgery.

I love and am deeply jealous of LitBox's book vending machines in D.C. This is a great example of ways to route around the damage of Orange It Can't Happen Here and his toadies. Fuck this administration and all of the good feels towards LitBox for figuring out a way forward.

Fuck this guy

A useful guide for disabling all of the bogus AI "features" on your various devices. I think the most important one is for Windows users because Copilot is a giant pile of make your life more complicated to simplify your life sold to you as a beneficial feature. It is not. It is a bug. Turn it off and get back to breaking your computer as god intended it: manually.

Zorin OS is a linux distribution dedicated to the idea of making it easy-ish to switch to and away from Windows and macOS. They had a big release timed perfectly for Windows 10's end of life. They have all of kinds of friendly features for simplifying your transition and, let's face it, Windows 11 is not a particularly appetizing choice given that they're removing most methods for creating local accounts which is a terrible, no good, and painful thing to see happen. This means the extinction of break glass accounts which can save your ass if whatever you authenticate against is unavailable. Given the recent outages with Entra ID, I'm guessing more people are looking for ways to, you know, use your computer while MSFT breaks shit. Pulling the plug on Copilot should probably be priority given MSFT's intent to have AI run your Windows machine seemingly whether you like it or not.

“We think we’re on the cusp of the next evolution, where AI happens not just in that chatbot and gets naturally integrated into the hundreds of millions of experiences that people use every day,” Yusuf Mehdi, executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft, told The Verge in a briefing. “The vision that we have is: let’s rewrite the entire operating system around AI, and build essentially what becomes truly the AI PC.”

 

- page 1 of 2