I mean, Chen has decades of winternals in his head. Microsoft has been gutting their staff for years now. When the Petzold/Chen generation hang up their spurs, does Microsoft still have a critical mass of people who understand Windows from the metal up?

- the lowest barrier to entry for pretty much anyone in corporate life. Boot PC, there it is.

- rapid data exploration. Just put something in a cell. Play around.

- extensive self-, community-, pro-, and AI help.

- an impressively powerful programming engine. Well, two really, one of which survives after 30 years and multiple murder attempts by Microsoft. You can build complete applications, UIs, database front ends, etc.

- serious tooling for power users via toolpaks and plugins

- just enough tooling to add visual polish to outputs.

Excel isnt the best at many things (I still pine for Improv, tbh) but it's good enough at a lot of things for that not to matter, and its so easy to get started, the allure is hard to ignore.

Gsheets comes close, but still (to my mind) smells amateurish for power users. Maybe that's my problem rather than Google's.

Six years ago I fed Dante's Inferno to AWS translation. It was...not good[1]. Maybe its time to try again and see how things have changed.

[1] https://github.com/ffx271/dante-inferno/blob/master/english/...

It's not cost since they are driving $90K Rams and F150s. I doubt it is politics. Even the design is going to please someone, people bought Azteks after all (Europeans: uglier than a Fiat Multipla). They're not in stealth mode since there are wrapped Cybertrucks, just not advertising electricians and landscapers like those on the F150s.

Are there any HN readers out there who can supply first hand reviews of what it was like as a work truck doing work truck things?

I got this vibe at AWS, interviewing in 2020. They asked me to design a stock price tracking webapp. I started asking questions and sketching things out and at each question (fairly basic ones, too, like, how many users are we supporting, how frequently do they request updates, and how timely does the data need to be). Seemed reasonable to me but I think my line of questions annoyed them because they said, "just design the app!" Maybe they thought I was stalling? Hmm, ok, but it'll fall over on day 2. I turned down the offer.

AT&T took some bad press around that time, and in July 2016, the FCC, facing political pressure, and now sensing that the PR gods were now on their side, leaned on the major carriers to set up a 'task force' to get things moving. I remember sitting in the little room at the FCC while various telco industry grandees bloviated. We all agreed that ATIS and IETF should define technical standards since they'd already made a start (Jim M did ATIS, for example) and so everyone agreed that STIR/SHAKEN was going to be The Path.

The original STIR/SHAKEN assumptions were that the attestation would be carried throughout the network in a SIP header and that every SIP processing element would deal with it. Reality soon intruded in the form of ancient telco equipment that didn't have the headroom to process another bunch of bytes in every call setup message. Another idea was to have signing and verification done by SIP application servers, but that didn't pan out for the same reasons. (Forgive me, I'm going to toot my own horn here for a second:) I invented a scheme with my colleagues where the signing or verification was an HTTPS operation triggered by the SIP device at the network perimeter (a 'session border controller' in telco-speak) which made the problem more tractable. AT&T took my PowerPoint and submitted a stunningly close copy as their own to the FCC. I still have the slides somewhere. I was salty at the time but ah well, what can you do: my employer still made money off the product with other customers.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48920432#48928781

see [1] for more on why stir/shaken hasnt helped as much as it ought to.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48920432#48928781

1. If it's not written down, it does not exist. This needs to be a ruthlessly enforced rule. I know we all love those Mel the Programmer stories, but that's a story about fragility. Similarly if you are relying on SRE or dev heroics to solve field problems, you have a gun to your head and you need to solve it yesterday.

2. The TCO of knowledge is dominated by the maintenance cost, not the creation cost. I see this mistake made a lot. Anyone can create a confluence page, Slack comment, SharePoint site or a git comment. The org must make it someone's job to grow, weed, and maintain these gardens. It does not matter what system you use, but someone needs to look after it.

You get a bonus for building information "data structures" that make it easy for people to pull data out as your org changes, but this is probably something you should accept that you'll get wrong as your org grows. AI hides this problem because it makes search so easy, sometimes, but it will come and bite you hard one day, so be ready for it.

If I was Corp A competing with Corp B, what stops me, today, from flooding reddit etc with anti-Corp B material to pollute the model, and then paying OpenAI to not just nudge users towards me but also away from Corp B?

If HMD came out with something that was optimized to the nth degree for whatsapp calls, that might be interesting, but even then I wonder how cheap it would need to be to compete with budget androids.

Everything is built to address that weakness - think DKIM, SPF, etc, plus STIR/SHAKEN, to say nothing of IP or ASN filtering, but they feel like bandaids on a very difficult problem. What you end up with are basically default-deny except for a personally curated trust set ("only accept calls from my contacts", "everything goes in spam unless I have previously corresponded with the sender"), etc.

One last robocall story. AT&T sat on their hands for years until consumer groups embarrassed the then-CEO enough to do something about it. There was a memorable interview in the Dallas Morning News where they called him on it instead of lobbing him softballs and I suspect that the embarrassment finally got through.

Type A attestation is, generally, solved. Carrier A attests that the number is one of theirs, and they know that the caller is one of theirs too and attached to their network.

However: this is a fraction of calls. Carriers also sell blocks of phone numbers without the corresponding access network. This is what allows you to pick, say, a Twilio number with a local area code. In these cases the best that can be hoped for is a lesser attestation.

But it gets worse, because the operator can also sell blocks of numbers to people with no direct connection to the US carriers and who need to spoof US numbers. That call from Capital One comes from the Philippines via two or three intermediate operators, none of whom can attest to much of anything. And into that gap ride the spammers.

Furthermore, in an Experian-like twist, some carriers also realized that businesses would pay to have their calls show up as "trusted" on the recipient's phone. So the standards were enhanced to deliver 'rich call data'. However, in order to be something worth paying for you also need a baseline of calls that do not have that premium look. A scam? You decide.

Finally, one other misaligned incentive. All of this needs VoIP. Not TDM (classic legacy telephony). However, the big US carriers make bank selling TDM circuits to the hundreds of small regional telcos, and refuse to sell them SIP trunks, because it's s such an easy money maker. So again, technology loses to incentives. These incentives, to make money from phone numbers, vastly outpace what

Copilot also has no semantic knowledge of Microsoft-but-not-365 things like PowerBI dashboards, so your average cubicle jockey, who doesnt have access to the data model, can't, say ask it to pull last month's sales figures. That's a giant hole in capability.

The agent discoverability is non existent, so teams end up repeating work. It doesnt have a skills.md type of model that allows for easy, non-admin, extensibility. And most fatal of all IMHO is that it does not play nicely with other non-Microsoft things out there. This may be as much a fault of Salesforce and Atlassian etc as Microsoft's, but Copilot cant see into and manipulate objects in those products (certainly not without admin-level approval, and even then, not very much).

I feel that Microsoft are losing the game here by not allowing a genuine democratization of what the tools can do. Excel is impregnable, not just because society is built on it, but because even the lowliest office grunt is allowed to use all of it. If Copilot can't be used and wired to everything that a knowledge worker uses without requiring IT- or 365-admin approval, then what will happen is that Shadow AI will show up and workers will start bringing thwir own AI tools into work, with ugly consequences for security and data exfiltration.

My crystal ball says that Microsoft know that CP cant do it all, so they will pitch Cowork, as a sort of workaround, at which point some companies will balk at the price and park CP in a dark corner while the real work gets done in Google Workspace or Slack or whatever other environment gives them more of what they need.