I moved largely away from Microsoft products in 2010 personally, and 2015 or so professionally. Just came back to them last year for a client.
What I am seeing are two really disturbing patterns: 1) really, really bad stuff that has been there for decades is still there, weighing everything down, for "backwards compatibility", and 2) a lot of horrible fluff and nonsense everywhere.
#1 is pretty self-explanatory, as I am editing docs in Word I am finding my muscle memory circa 1999 or so still works with it due to all of the formatting bugs that still exist.
#2 I saw with Windows 11 and the crazy adverts everywhere, seemingly random UI choices, half-broken or implemented tools and applications, and now random UI buttons thrown everywhere.
The 1-2 punch is devastating and makes using Microsoft products 10x more depressing than it was 10-15 years ago, and it wasn't a happy fest then either for me.
So to me, AI is just "more of the same" with Microsoft. It is more random shit thrown on the wall to see what will stick.
Backwards compatibility has always been a Microsoft staple. What used to be a huge selling point - depending on the audience - is now clearly a crutch. Right now, it seems that the tech debt has finally started making the whole stack lean like the Tower of Pisa.
This article resonates strongly. I am consulting right now to a group that has enormous struggles technically, but they are all self-inflicted wounds that come down to people and process.
Management claims to want to understand and fix the problem, and their "fixes" reveal the real problems. Fix 1 - schedule a lot of group meetings for twice a week. After week 1, management drops off and fails to show up anymore for most of them. The meetings go off track. The answer? More meetings!
We now have that meeting daily. And have even less attendance.
Fix 2 - we don't know what people are doing, let's create dashboards. A slapdash, highly incorrect and problematic dashboard is created. It doesn't matter, because none of the managers ever checks the dashboard. The big boss hears we are still behind, and commandeers a random product person to be his admin assistant and has her maintain several spreadsheets in semi-secret tracking everyone's progress.
This semi-secret spreadsheet becomes non-secret and people find a million and one problems with it (not surprising as the commandeered admin assistant nee product person was pulling the data from all sorts of random areas with little direction with little coordination with others). We then have the spreadsheet war of various managers having their own spreadsheets.
Fix 3 - we are going to have The Source of Truth for product intake and ongoing development, with a number of characteristics (and these are generally not terrible characteristics). These are handed off to a couple of junior people with no experience to implemented with zero feedback. The net result is we still don't have a Source of Truth, but more of an xkcd situation that now we have 4 or 5 sources of truth strung together with scripts, duct tape, bandaids and prayer.
This continues on and on over years. Ideas are put forth, some good, some bad, some indifferent, but none of them matter because the leaders lack the ability to followup or demonstrate even basic understanding of what our group actually does.
It is truly soul crushing, but in this jobs environment, what are you going to do?
I worked somewhere with a similarly dysfunctional culture.
Peak absurdity, yet you and I have both seen it happen first hand. I wonder how common it is, because it's as ugly as it is mystifying.
When management isn't properly engaged, they need to delegate to someone who is. If neither things happen, it's just chaos and angry, ignorant apes making a lot of noise.
> in this jobs environment, what are you going to do?
I am currently unemployed with a rapidly shrinking cushion, and I'm honestly on the fence as to whether putting up with the above would be better. If there is no hope for improvement, all you're doing is exchanging your mental health for a few more beans.
So you are a long way from Kindergarten to an elite university. I mention this because it is odd to me that you picked your 4 to 5 year old self to validate why you are getting accommodations in your teens/twenties at a self-described elite university.
My own kids have some issues and varying levels of accommodations, but those have evolved and lessened over time. As you would hope they would! You seem to imply your conditions have not really improved and you need same/similar accommodations now as you did 15 years ago?
Sorry, I am trying not to be offensive here but I am genuinely confused.
The point they made about grade school, to me, points more towards early recognition now leads to more kids having a shot at top schools.
Not because they have a 'disability' or a particular type of accommodation, but because it was caught early enough and worked with by people that cared, that now they have a model for learning that better suits them. It was never an issue with intelligence, only that some of us* run into walls because the standard learning lane is pretty narrow. Crashing into those walls in grade school is likely what kept many people* from going to top colleges (or any college) -- but now that it's better understood and worked with at an early age we are seeing people show up who can do the same correct work, but do it in a way that's different.
* Im also dyslexic, but from the days that wasn't a thing in my mediocre public school. I was simply a slow reader that couldn't spell (or pronounce or "sound out" words) or read out loud, but somehow had high scores in other language/comprehension test.
You incorrectly drew an implication. The authors words only actually imply that some accommodations are still needed, not that they are the same accommodations.
This conclusion is obvious given that the underlying condition is not curable.
You inferred or assumed that...OP didn't say it. It's common sense that accommodations would be different for children just learning to read vs. university students.
Lots of things don't go away, like socioeconomic factors, intelligence differences, not having been tutored in childhood, but we don't accommodate for that.
I think they mean to refute the article's suggestion that tiktok and misinformation are the cause by highlighting that they received accommodations at a young age.
>You seem to imply your conditions have not really improved and you need same/similar accommodations
They didn't share the nature of their current accommodations.
No offense taken. My first point was that some of these students were legitimately diagnosed with learning disabilities long before grades, the SAT, or college admissions were even a thought. I also should have been more clear that I wasn't diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD until I was around 9, so I went from needing to repeat grades to being more successful in school as a result of getting the support I needed.
My overall point is that learning disabilities like dyslexia have no impact on intelligence, and accommodations just level the playing field. I imagine that if I hadn't been diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD, I wouldn't have made it to the same school.
But for people who truly need academic accommodations, the playing field will never be level, because every aspect of school takes them longer. I don't get more time to study for exams, and if it takes me twice as long to read and comprehend the same chapter of a textbook as someone without dyslexia, I have to study twice as long just to get through the same content. I think it's fair that I get to take notes using "prohibited technology" during lecture when it is impossible for me to decode what the lecturer is saying fast enough to turn it into handwritten notes.
However, I agree with the article that the percentage of students who claim to have disabilities has gotten out of control. Almost 60% of the students in the extended exam room finish the exam in the standard time anyway. It does make it appear as though everyone with accommodations is gaming the system.
Having ADHD and dyslexia is not "quirky" or fun. It consistently ruins my life. It is not something I make part of my identity.
This will probably get me voted into oblivion, but reading your posts here, I wonder how you would do if accommodations were taken away from you entirely in your elite university.
Maybe I am completely wrong, but I suspect rather strongly you would do just fine based on what I am reading here.
And before people flame me into oblivion, in addition to my own kids I know lots of others with significant learning disabilities. They have one thing in common: they don't write like this.
I liked the idea behind this post, but really the author fairly widely missed the mark in my opinion.
The extent to which you can "fool the optimizer" is highly dependent on the language and the code you're talking about. Python is a great example of a language that is devilishly hard to optimize for precisely because of the language semantics. C and C++ are entirely different examples with entirely different optimization issues, usually which have to do with pointers and references and what the compiler is allowed to infer.
The point? Don't just assume your compiler will magically make all your performance issues go away and produce optimal code. Maybe it will, maybe it won't.
As always, the main performance lessons should always be "1) Don't prematurely optimize", and "2) If you see perf issues, run profilers to try to definitively nail where the perf issue is".
Digging around, OK that makes sense. But even in the context of C and C++, there are often more ways the compiler can't help you than ways it can.
The most common are on function calls involving array operations and pointers, but a lot of it has to do with the C/C++ header and linker setup as well. C and C++ authors should not blithely assume the compiler is doing an awesome job, and in my experience, they don't.
Here in NJ, I live in a small town of around 7,000 or so. We have a Township Committee form of government, five committee people with one nominally as Mayor (but really the same as everyone else). They get a yearly stipend of around $5,000 a year or a little less.
It sounds crazy but our whole muni budget is under $5 million. We have almost no infrastructure other than roads (98% of housing is on well water and septic systems, there are no street lights or sewers or the like).
A lot of municipal government in the US is like this. Very small with near-volunteers running everything.
You are right that this rules out a lot of people who can't afford to effectively volunteer for local government. I think mostly this is a good thing.
I agree that blind trusts don't fix everything, but it is a start.
The situation right now isn't just corrupting, congress-critters are labeled as idiots by their own if they don't actively take advantage of "perks" like free stock tips that would be illegal in any other context.
The "everyone does it" excuse is what keeps this house of cards up. And it is not partisan, both D's and R's inevitably become rich if they stay in the house for more than a couple of terms.
Anyone looking to actually do something interesting with a piece of land is going to have to a much higher resolution map of the site, not use the extreme zoom and on a map covering a huge area.
Or they may even go rogue and visit the place! Heavens to Murgatroyd!
As a child of the 70s and 80s, Snoopy was a very big deal, but Peanuts was kind of secondary.
I remember around 2nd grade or so Snoopy Joe Cool was a big deal and I had the t shirts and thermos and lunchbox.
There are of course the Peanuts TV specials, they didn’t have much impact on me personally other than to solidify a like of both Snoopy and his side kick, Woodstock.
For me as a kid, Snoopy and Stocky were the only interesting ones.
What I am seeing are two really disturbing patterns: 1) really, really bad stuff that has been there for decades is still there, weighing everything down, for "backwards compatibility", and 2) a lot of horrible fluff and nonsense everywhere.
#1 is pretty self-explanatory, as I am editing docs in Word I am finding my muscle memory circa 1999 or so still works with it due to all of the formatting bugs that still exist.
#2 I saw with Windows 11 and the crazy adverts everywhere, seemingly random UI choices, half-broken or implemented tools and applications, and now random UI buttons thrown everywhere.
The 1-2 punch is devastating and makes using Microsoft products 10x more depressing than it was 10-15 years ago, and it wasn't a happy fest then either for me.
So to me, AI is just "more of the same" with Microsoft. It is more random shit thrown on the wall to see what will stick.
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