I can’t remember it, but I read one Microsoft blog post (in Vista era?) about how one team at Microsoft would develop some amazing new Windows component. They’d proudly name it AmazingNewService.dll. And then the operating system team would come in and say “that’s all fine and good, but you have to conform to the naming convention.” 8+3 filenames. First two letters probably “MS”, because of reasons. …and 15 years later, people still regularly go “What the fuck is MSAMNSVC.DLL?”
Like I said this was in the Vista era. Or possibly before the Vista release, part of the Longhorn hype train (Longhorn got some super hyped features, such as an epic next-generation filesystem to replace NTFS, which Microsoft ultimately canned, and Vista ended up, you know, being Vista).
This was so long ago that I unfortunately don’t remember what exact feature this was about, but it was about some new Windows component.
Well this was Vista era, they were probably doing that to ensure some sort of expectation from particularly tricky legacy apps. Windows prefers not to break old apps if at all possible.
They’ll do an outlook: cut features from the desktop version until it’s exactly the same as the web version, because every interface needs to be a facsimile of the web, right?
Software teams solved this a fucking eternity ago through shared component and design libraries. Meanwhile, all of these FAANG companies are out here pushing surveillance tools that are all clearly built by siloed teams with zero collaboration.
Even Microsoft did. Their Office Application libraries are phenomenal.
Scriptable object based libraries that work and do so cross platform. It’s a thing of beauty and I’ve never seen MS ever do anything even remotely like it again.
I think it’s just part of this “move fast” mentality. We’re at a point where we’re forced to move so quickly that things get thrown out the window just to meet a deadline.
Well its public so who knows in what other package is using it. And it’s static, so who know what kind if monster is calling it from some inapropriate place. I have seen static methods being called from translation/localization files, because “it works”.
IntelliJ finds most uses in my experience unless you’re doing something weird with reflection or similar. And if it’s a public facing API only used by the library’s consumers…– it should be used in tests at the very least! Especially if it’s prone to regressions like the comment suggests
Yea… Microsoft has a history of doing this a lot… their “concession” to being a large software developer is that each version of an app seems to have an entirely different team that develops independently from the other platform versions (the best you can say is that they occasionally borrow good features from one another).
I recently got forcefully switched to “New Teams” at work which is a strict downgrade and doesn’t support half the shit the browser app (which, as a reminder, is a weird Frankenstein of calendar and email) supports. It also absolutely bombards users with unnecessary notifications that need to be individually muted.
Never have I appreciated Google more than when I was forced from GSuite to SharePoint, Teams, Outlook, Visio, etc…
I love how new Teams doesn’t even have a contacts list for chat anymore, it’s just your most recent chats. And if you search for someone, any recent group chats with that person show up first so you may still have to scroll to find that person’s chat. Oh, and we store documents on Teams so if I want to switch between looking through the document repository and chat I still have to do a whole bunch of clicks between the two.
I don’t fault them for when my project manager tags @everyone on the group chat with an important message saying “good morning and happy Monday” though. I wish I were kidding.
I like how the teams team wasted hours making a new notification popup system instead of using the default system on the user’s os. They wasted time to just make a worse thing that’s also buggy. If users send too many messages at once, you end up having notification popups stacking on top of each other until it completely fills your screen.
I’ve been using it for forever and also used it for DnD, based off of…what’s his name, one of the bigger DM guys on YT. It works great.
I’m using Obsidian for work since cloud note apps are blocked and I don’t like it as much. It works, but I’m not as wild about it.
One issue I recently had with one note is that I wanted to export a section to share on the web and wasn’t able to do it and the web interface doesn’t really let me do the management that I need. My work machine is my main one right now, so I’m stuck with what I’ve got. That all being said, aside from privacy, there isn’t really a direct reason to change.
But I’m not super wild that MS is reading my notes since I’ve also used it as a diary at points. I’ll have to figure that bit out later.
I lost a bunch of journals somehow when they made one of the bigger changes to One Note. I have no idea what happened and maybe it was my fault for not backup my data better, but I lost years of journals that I couldn’t recover (i wasted weeks trying).
That’s the idea of those “which pictures contain bikes?” ones and the ReCaptcha (where you had two words from books). In the book one, one of the words is known and the other is not. They’ll present the same unknown word to people until they get a clear answer from many dozens or hundreds of entries, using the known word as a control. Then that other word goes into the known words category.
Fun fact not only to captchas monitor your input but also can analyze how you input it. If you mouse moves in a perfectly straight line if all your key presses are precisely spaced, you are probably not human.
Sure two additional cases not that bad, now just keep adding them up. Like anything security related it’s not 100% perfect you just have to make it annoying to break.
No. Security through obscurity is bad security, but it’s still an additional layer. And since there’s literally no way to 100% ensure that a machine is being controlled by a human, there’s literally no other way except saying “fuck it” and not doing any security at all.
They were used as example heuristics by Google marketing when they launched the checkbox reCaptcha. They were just simple to understand things for marketing purposes, but in reality Google checks many different signals and isn’t based on mouse movements. But people keep repeating the example from the ad.
Honestly, I’m not mad if AI fully defeats captchas to the point they go away. They almost always fail to be usable via accessibility tools. These things might block some automated systems, but they also block people with disabilities.
When I ran a public installation of web forum software (more than a decade ago), I got spambot registrations, then I think I just set up a captcha where users had to answer some really simple question; this kept the spambots away.
Yeah, it’s about barrier to entry. Any question will bypass dumb automation, even hard captcha is defeated by a Task Rabbit or Fiverr job to make 10 accounts and post some s#!t
Probably at some point in the future, the automation tools they’re using will support throwing in a GPT API token. But AI calls aren’t free so maybe we’ll squeak by.
There’s also the real possibility that if somebody is actually using AI the bot text will be good enough that nobody will know for certain it’s a bot.
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