> installation procedure that requires a fecal sample and iris scan

Do you work for Microsoft or something? Please do do not give them ideas.

Last week on a comedy show (the daily show) they made a joke about bill gates "micro and soft" which was old in the 90s already, so I can confirm this is the case.

I used to have a M$ email signature 30 years ago, and pay, nowaydays I mostly use Windows on my laptop, because I am not willing to pay Apple prices even though I can afford them, and even last year I was dealing with GNU/Linux installation issues on a Gigabyte BRIX.

The same as every other Discord server: Giving a few people the feeling of power over dozens of channels with memes and unsearchable low-quality "discussions".

It reminds me of the US army and their fabulous idea to open a Twitch channel. Went as well as you expect.

“Your sample was insufficient. Please try again later.”

I can really see them ship the first, that's at the same time very funny, and quite sad.

If you're German-speaking: "Klopilot" and "Vibrierkot" are some modern day personal favorites.

On a similar, nostalgic note, I recall boot screens for "Sinnlos 98" floating around, back when modifying the bootup logo was a thing.

Don't forget Windoze.

I'd imagine that there's some discussion about how to make the most out of the tool as well as discussion of experiments and capabilities. I'm not even sure what exactly "Microsoft Copilot" entails anymore because of the multiple rebrands, but having a place where you can discuss exploring plugins and other adjacent features seems useful.

Not quite the same, but recently I was recently looking around for communities centered around Claude Code for discussion about people's workflows as well as discussion about what plugins people are using and if they notice it making a significant difference.

Since the technology is still evolving, having an active community can help you discover new patterns and explore the space more effectively.

There are regions in Germany (Hessen) where "Azure" is pronounced the exact same way as "Ärger" (trouble). Makes you think...

first one is a really slick tooltip ui to make sure people read tooltips. hover over button, it slides out while revealing tooltip text in its place, move cursor to button again

if you want to make sure people read a lot of instructions you can chain this so that you need to hover over the button multiple times, revealing the instructions a bit at a time

"Der Ätsch-Browser".

[delayed]

Maybe all the users are OpenClaw instances?

Why would anyone use Teams?

Dogfooding only works when the dog food is edible.

"please drink the verification can"

Don't forget Winblows

> [...] I'm not even sure what exactly "Microsoft Copilot" entails anymore [...]

Watching from the sidelines (not a Microsoft user), I've completely lost track. Between this, the Azure 365 cloud whatever stuff, I have no idea what many of the products even exactly are any more.

Internet exploder

Probably the AI blocked it

i'd argue a discord is never really "public", since there's still a barrier to entering and it's easy to get banned

Simply put Microsoft is the worst company at naming stuff. Even when they come up with a good name for something, they'll name 3 other totally different products the same thing to maximize confusion.

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus

Internet Exploiter

Another oldie

"If you play the Win98 CD backwards, it summons Satan. It's worse when you play it forwards - it installs Windows"

Ah, good times... :-)

I would say that “microslop” is akin to the old term “micro$oft”, which was a good sign of immaturity of whoever used it.

Has there ever been a single good piece of writing that uses "M$" or the likes?

"M$" may not be insulting in itself, but it's certainly typically associated with insultingly poor writing.

They did not rewrite Notepad in Rust? Seems to be an easy target

Why get yourself twisted like this?

They can do a bad thing, and then you can make fun of it with an insult.

Own it, the insult is warranted, why hide and pretend it's not an insult.

If Microsoft is consistently shipping slop, then they deserve insults over it; not every "bad" thing is always unwarranted. Locking someone in a box is "bad", prison is a necessary thing that benefits society. Insults are "bad" and sometimes warranted.

I had to reinstall win98 so many times I still remember the pirate key k4hvdq9tj96crx9c9g68rq2d3 by heart

good times :)

How is M$ insulting? It just looks like a leetspeak version of MS.

It is supposed to indicate Microsoft cares only about money, which to me too, seems in the same league as microslop, i.e. mildly insulting but really not rude enough to be worth censoring.

And other insults are just words as well. It's the intention, history, connotation etc. behind words that give them meaning. M$ is meant as an insult, hence it's insulting. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/M$

I guess I was more of the FCKGW generation. :)

Ah, FuCK Gates, William.

I think there were at least three other commonly used codes, but this one was by far the most popular.

IIRC with Windows 98 you could just use any product key you had on as many machines as you wanted since there was no activation or real phoning home capabilities. So most likely your whole friend group would be using the same serial that was copied off your uncle's old gateway.

Lets go further, year of the Hurd desktop!

Were they ever out of it? A wolf in sheep's clothing is still a wolf... Microsoft has been incredibly anti-consumer for the duration of their existence (even before Steve Ballmer made it blatent)

Most HN readers would now, but in the case somebody new reads it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

> The Streisand effect describes a situation where an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information results in the unintended consequence of the effort instead increasing public awareness of the information.

Our vocabulary is so stunted. Has no one else noticed that we increasingly talk about the world like it's fiction playing out in front of us?

Villain? More like geriatric.

Feel free to say microslop as much as possible, but it should be noted that many people will automatically dismiss your opinion when you do. I don't know if I agree with doing so or not, but it is more common than you'd think. And no, they aren't just microsoft shills.

BAHBOORAAAAAAH

"Has no one else noticed that we increasingly talk about the world like it's fiction playing out in front of us?"

Most of our world is a fiction or at least a highly distorted version of reality.

My advice to people is: Get out into nature, stop believing everything on the news and meet people in person.

Most of the news is ragebait designed to get you angry at specific targets rather than the systems themselves.

Nobody can gauge the world for what it really is. It has always been like that. Proper empiricism is expensive and often enough impossible.

It's not a vocab problem. It's inherent to the human brain, which appears to be fundamentally designed to prefer to view the world in terms of stories, with heroes, villains, and a narrative arc.

Language shifts and evolves over time as the lives and viewpoints of speakers evolve.

Your complaint is that young people use English in a way you dislike.

There's inability, and there's not trying.

You don't have to tell me - even Bill S: "and what's he then that says I play the villain?"

Unfortunately, the collective quality of our storytelling is waning. Most people watch the least common denominator.

So now the greater human truth you allude to is being filtered through the streaming age mode of storytelling, and people have arcs, and bingo cards, and everything is reduced to water-cooler levels of urgency and relevance.

Or devolve. Perhaps it reflects an increasing detachment from reality in younger generations.

The complaint isn't actually about they way they're speaking. The way they're speaking is a symptom of the way they're thinking.

In an age of the dumbest, most propagandistic narratives since the 50s, pumped out by the largest multinational corporations in history. Young people are looking at the world through shitty Marvel movie-colored glasses.

It's also not their fault, and the fictions they think they're living through are written by gen Xers being paid by boomers. It is not a youthful point of view, it is the sabotage of any emergence of a youth point of view, substituted with Disney product.

> Language shifts and evolves over time as the lives and viewpoints of speakers evolve.

This is a "things just happen" argument. Things happen for reasons.

Is it though? Or are we simply in an environment that is heavily skewed toward "Great Person" theory narratives?

When Microslop bans "Microslop" I don't need to try. I use their software daily, I know how their technical support is utterly fucked now and how rare the heroic power user actually solving the case for every co-sufferer has become. And I know I'm not alone.

Just recently they fixed the Win 11 start menu bug where they forgot to expose any functionality behind the "hide mobile pane" button. At least the forced recents are gone now, Jesus Christ! This is toddler level software engineering.

It's a corporation suffering from corporate things and the ridiculously out of control financialization of everything, feeding on its insane first mover advantage and network effects. This attempt to hide it is simply embarrassing.

There's only gonna be so much thinking or research involved and forget contacting primary sources or anything like that.

This isn't a new thing. Ancient stories like the Iliad or the Odyssey are discreetly historical records of a particular region mixed in with mythological foundations of a particular culture, but framed as the stories of Achilles ("Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.") and Odysseus ("Speak, memory, of the cunning hero, the wanderer, blown off course time and again after he plundered Troy's sacred heights."). Likewise, ancient fables and parables are moral lessons couched in terms of stories with protagonists whose actions demonstrate the intended lesson, and this sort of thing is universal across every ancient culture for which we have records. Stories stick in the human mind, and they're what humans most prioritize transmitting forward through time.

> When Microslop bans "Microslop" I don't need to try

You might consider completely reversing this position for the rest of your life.