Survivorship bias i suspect, the company needs to fuck up big enough for it to be worth noting, survive that fuck-up and then admit enough wrongdoing (fiscally, if nothing else) to be able to be in the situation where a story like that would come out.

I think we'll hear more over time, but as a thing that happened in the past.

Some companies might not survive to rehire, some might only just survive and rehiring isn't on the cards.

Some might limp forwards and work through without rehires.

Personally I see LLMs as a tool like any other. You can use it to mass produce low quality slop, just as you can use it to help you produce a higher quality output.

I agree with this in principle, but I'd argue that it's more like an industrial table saw than a hand saw.

Meaning the potential for damage is much greater with this particular tool (for various reasons) which means that it need proper training and experience, safeguards, maintenance and fail-safes to be used effectively (without doing yourself or others damage).

The potential damage of using this tool is a bit less immediate and obvious than an industrial table saw however, which means you should be extra careful.

!remindme 2 years

I meant 'forced' as in ' forced by their capitalist greed and culture ' not like there's an actual threat to anything but the quarterly bonuses of the current golden parachute holder.

Eventually, perhaps they'll fuck up enough for it to be an existential threat to the company.

I'm the meantime they'll just continue pretending copilot is a serious contender outside of their walled garden and probably lay off a few thousand people they don't care about, to balance the numbers.

Edit : "a few days later" - https://lemmy.world/post/48874177

TL;DR;

Capitalists gonna capitalise,

Fiscal gain is always going to be the reason behind decisions, even if it doesn't seem like it on the face of it.

Especially microsoft, with it's history.

I'll preface this with, this is just my opinion etc...

I say must, should, has to, etc with the conviction of my opinion, not proof of objective fact.

i have some insight into the subject/industry but nothing i'd be willing to verify with anyone, so make of that what you will.

It's less a specific thing to point to and more of a general "profit driven company is going to make profit driven decisions", even if perceived altruism was deemed the best fiscal decision, the primary goal is still commercial viability.

A full extra year of security updates requires resources.

Unless they are doing something wildly outside the norms of software development, that means development, testing, deployment, hosting, tooling, marketing/PR, support and more.

There's both CapEx and OpEx costs to that kind of endeavour.

For a product of any size that's a non-zero resource cost, for a product the size of windows that's a big number, perhaps not in the grand scheme, but it's a non-trivial amount.

That is historically not the kind of thing that microsoft would do/has done just for the altruistic benefit of it's users.

Feel free to provide examples to the contrary, i'd be pleasantly surprised.

So assuming it's not altruism that drives this decision, the only other conclusion i could come up with was commercial viability/profit/money.

That might be a failure of imagination on my part.

The projected cost of not doing this must outweigh the projected benefit of going through with it.

Be that in goodwill, user/customer retention, PR, straight up sales or something else, there must be a benefit that outweighs the cost of just dropping support.

I could speculate on specifics but it'd mostly be rehashing the thousands of articles on poor decisions (and poor timing) around the whole win 11 rollout and windows in general.

i don't mean this from an old man shouts at cloud viewpoint, i don't particularly care for windows(or microsoft) but I'm not a rabid hater.

Microsoft has some good products that i use regularly, despite their constant and repeated attempts to enshittify all of the end user experiences they can in pursuit of fiscal gain.

That being said, the win 11 rollout has been a shambles on many fronts.

Microsoft is forced to provide another year of security updates because a series of historic and ongoing colossal fuckups have made it more commercially viable for them to do so than the alternative.

There is no "give" here, they are doing it for themselves, that the user potentially benefits is incidental.

The argument they were making is poor.

However, moral conviction has no bearing on objective correctness.

Edit: If it did, any voluntarily suicide bomber would be objectively correct.

I'd address the other point but It doesn't sound like you're open to viewpoints that are not your own.( and don't seem to understand what objective truth actually entails )

Edit Edit:

"Cowardly Downvotes Are Bad" is another example of something that is subjective.

I believe it to be true, but that belief doesn't change the the fact that that statement isn't objectively correct. ( as in, provably true for everyone regardless of their perspectives or beliefs )

"One persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter" is a concise way that the goodness or badness of an actions or outcomes is filtered through the subjective lens of the whoever happens to be considering the topic.

On an individual level, "don't be a dick" is a pretty useful guideline , but even that is subject to what each person thinks constitutes dickish behaviour.

We’re social creatures, we have to live in societies, and it’s not difficult to determine pro social vs anti social behaviors.

Even that is subjective, think about what is socially acceptable in Finland?, how about Russia?, Morocco? France?

Do they all have the same idea of socially acceptable behaviours?

How about now vs 50 years ago? 100 years ago? 200 years in the future?.

Sure, there are some that are fairly common, but i wouldn't consider those to be of a sufficient percentage of the whole that i could disregard behvaioural subjectivity, but that's just my opinion.

The problem with most things that use good and bad as a foundation is that they never account for perspective.

Good and bad are made up and subjective.

If you don't account for that in your positions then you're setting yourself up for fundamentalism.

huh, i knew they used bing under the hood but for some reason it didn't occur to me that the promotions and ads would bleed through.

that's an easy one.

google is an ad company, their main customers are the people who buy ads, pretending you need a toilet seat let's them charge toilet seat makers more to "target" you